Bringing Child Rights into Your Classroom: An Educator’s Guide

Published March 2013

Using the Bringing Child Rights into Your Classroom Guide

Bringing child rights into your classroom is about exactly that – learning how to integrate children’s rights information, instruments and tools into lessons and activities in your classroom!

What is it?

• A guide to teach your class what children’s rights are all about. It provides an overview of children’s rights and then focuses separately on seven major rights of our children.
• A helping hand to make children’s rights more than just writing on a piece of paper – it’s about teaching children how their rights relate to their worlds.
• A series of children’s stories and activities designed to make children’s rights fun and accessible for Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Children.
• Some methods to help you embed human rights in your classroom every day.

Who is it for?

This guide has been specifically designed for early childhood educators working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children up to 8 years of age.

How do I use it?

For each child right in this guide, there are three sections to help you bring these rights into your class.

• What is this right all about?: This is a reference for you to read through before you teach your class. It will give you a sense of exactly what this right is all about.
• Story Time: This is a fun children’s story written especially for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
• Activity Time: This is a series of activities you can choose from to help continue your class session on each human right.

This Educator’s Guide is part of a larger child rights pack that includes:

• Child Rights Educator’s Guide
• Child rights children’s poster series (seven posters)
• Child rights activity book

This Educator’s Guide is to be used in conjunction with the Children’s Rights Poster Series. There are seven child rights explained in this guide, and for each right, there is a special poster to match.

Why should you teach child rights to children?

Whilst the idea of child rights may seem too difficult for very young children, we now know that from a young age, children are actively developing the skills to understand complex concepts. Their sense of right and wrong, their identity as socially responsible beings, and their sense of fairness are all growing and developing. Teaching children about their rights is an important part of this development – even for those children who are too young to read the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Here’s a quick summary of why we should teach child rights to young children:

• All children in Australia have these rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
• Article 42 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child states that all children have a right to learn about their rights – including children who are not old enough to read the Convention themselves. This Article also states that adults have a duty to teach children about their rights.
• Learning about their rights empowers children and helps them to claim these rights.
• Learning about their rights helps children understand how to respect other people’s rights, to behave in socially responsible ways, and to identify and connect with other children across Australia and the world.
• Learning about their rights helps children learn how to take action to promote children’s rights. For example, after learning that all children have the right to nutrition, but that many children in their community weren’t having this right fulfilled, children at an early childhood centre in Canada successfully initiated a school breakfast program.