UNITS 7 & 8 – Children and Young People

• SDG 1 – No Poverty
• SDG 4 – Quality Education

After every two Units you are offered a choice of extension tasks. Depending on what area you most want to develop, choose and complete a relevant task. You are welcome to complete as many as you like.

These are not tests, and no marks are awarded. They are opportunities to develop your language further, based on a self-assessment of your needs.

NOTE: It may be that in your local context you are not able to access the videos on YouTube. They’re included here alongside other free-to-access resources, so hopefully you will still have plenty of choice.

Develop your knowledge of the SDGs

1. Test your knowledge of SDG1 & SDG4 with Go Goals digital board game

Go Goals is a ready-to-use board game developed by the United Nations that helps understand the Sustainable Development Goals, and how each of us can contribute to realising the goals. Access this link to the game and click on the white circle next to goal 1 and goal 4 and answer the set of quiz questions that appear. Check your answers when you are done. 

2. Find out more about SDG4

Read the UNESCO ‘Unpacking SDG 4: Education 2030; Guide‘. Choose one section to focus on and write a summary, or personal response to it.

3. Complete a short course about Poverty and SDG1. Find the interactive course here

4. Input any text into the OSDG Wheel  and you will be able to see any key SDGs in the text along with their estimated relevance scores (%), followed by any additional SDGs found in the text. Try inputting one of the texts you’ve been reading in these 2 Units.

Develop your speaking

Design and deliver a Pecha Kucha (Japanese for chit-chat). This presentation format is based on using 20 presentation slides but only talking about each of them for 20 seconds (each presentation should be 6 minutes and 40 seconds long).

• Only still images on the slides – no text or videos
• Each slide only stays on the screen for 20 seconds only
• What you say should be about the slide that is showing

Choose one of the topics below and find 20 relevant images:

1. What you’ve learned in these two Units: Create a presentation with images of different topics or themes you have studied.
2. One of the Goals:  Create a presentation with images based on one of the SDGs.
3. A story: Create a sequence of images of people places and things related to one or both of the SDGs.
4. An initiative you would like to be involved with: Research an initiative happening somewhere in the world. Create a sequence of 20 images.

Configure your slide timings so that the slides automatically change after 20 seconds. This will oblige you to be very concise!

Record your presentation here:

Develop your writing

1. ‘Without My Mum’, created by award-winning stop motion animation director Catherine Prowse, tells the story of a mother and her young son whose familiar, loving relationship suddenly changes forever. Watch the video (created by The Refugee Council) and use the prompts that appear on the screen to help you write a paragraph that gives your personal response to it.
2. Write for the Voices of Youth blog.
3. Watch the animation (8 mins) on Vimeo about two polar bears who are driven into exile due to global warming. They encounter brown bears along their journey, with whom they try to cohabit. The video encourages us to think about climate change, and migration, and the way migrants are treated. Write a paragraph that gives your personal response to the video.

Develop your reading – Reading for interest

Access one (or more) of the links and read the text. Practice your skim reading first to get a general idea of what the text is about, and then read in more detail, focusing on the parts that interest you.

Articles from The Conversation:

• Abdulrazak Gurnah: what you need to know about the winner of the 2021 Nobel prize for Literature. Gurnah won for for his ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents’.
• Global inequality may be falling but the gap between the haves and the have nots is growing
• Some refugee girls may be forced into early marriage for safety
• Poverty is linked to poorer brain development – but reading can help counteract it
• Around a million children in the UK are living in destitution with harmful consequences for their development
• Inequality of education in the UK is among the highest of rich nations.
• Nearly half of the world’s poor are now children: that’s 689 million young people.
• Blunting the impact of poor social conditions in South Africa will have big health benefits.

IQ tests

• Online IQ “quizzes” purport to be able to tell you whether or not ‘you have what it takes to be a member of the world’s most prestigious high IQ society’. But despite this hype, the relevance, usefulness and legitimacy of the IQ test is still hotly debated among educators, social scientists, and hard scientists.
• To understand why, it’s important to understand the history underpinning the birth, development and expansion of IQ tests – one that includes their use to further marginalise ethnic minorities and poor communities. Listen to our in depth article, which explores this history.

Education

• ‘Growing up on the Streets’ story maps – Visual representation of research (Unit 7).

Develop your listening

Listen for interest

Access the link and listen to The Conversation podcast. Listen once for general idea and then listen again for detail, focusing on the parts that interest you. The IQ test wars: why screening for intelligence is still so controversial.

Dictation

To practice your listening and writing skills, go to the Listen and Write site. Listen to the audio ‘We Were Them: Vietnamese Americans Help Afghan Refugees’ and complete the dictation task as you listen. Write what you hear in the box and click ‘stop’ as often as you need to. If you get stuck, click ‘hint’ and the words will appear.

Play an interactive web-based game

1. Darfur is Dying is a web-based, viral video game that provides a window into the experience of the 2.5 million refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan. It is designed to raise awareness of the genocide taking place in Darfur and empower college students to help stop the crisis.
2. Syrian Journey is a digital project that explores the exodus of the Syrian people. It is composed of three parts: a ‘newsgame’; survivor’s stories; and discussion about #WhatWouldYouTake. The project aims to bring the audience closer to the plight of Syrian refugees in an interactive and creative way. Fully responsive for mobile.

Take action

1. Access the link to the ‘Take Action Today’ site for Goal 1 and/or Goal 4 and select an action you can take in your everyday life to help meet the aims of these SDGs.
2. Or choose an action from The Good Life Goals.
3. Or choose an action from 170 Actions.

Sing

1. ‘In the Ghetto’, by Elvis Presley (1969)

A ghetto is an informal settlement, or a squalid and overcrowded urban district where very poor people of a particular race or religion live closely together and apart from other people. Listen to the song and decide what Presley’s view is of people living in poverty in the ghetto of a large American city.

Listen to the song. When you have listened record your response to the song. This could be:

• • a short, written response
  • a drawing
  • an infographic
  • a video of yourself talking about it (made on your phone)
  • any other mode that allows you to respond to the song

Find the song here on YouTube.

2. ‘He was Alone’, by Yusuf Islam (2016)

“He was alone, when he was 12

Only his thoughts, which he kept to himself

He didn’t have a place to play

A friend to call, or a word to say”

Islam sings about the fear and desperation of child refugees mixed with hopeful dreams of rainbows, white horses and a return home. He says “while the world faces incomprehensible numbers and statistics created by the refugee crisis the tragedy and story of a single soul gets missed. It was difficult to stand by just watching this tragedy without trying to do something. I simply decided to help humanize the narrative and lend my voice to the call for keeping hearts and doors open to every refugee, especially youngsters, who have lost what future they might have once hoped for.”

To see the transcript click ‘watch on YouTube’. When you are in YouTube, click the text under the video where it says ‘…more’.

Something else?

Is there something you’ve spent time studying that hasn’t been covered above? What is it? Explain in detail either in writing or as an audio file on your phone.

Use the menu bar on the left-hand side of the screen to access Section 3.