Consent: workshop for kids

NB: If you share this post on social media or publish photos of yourself doing the workshop, don't forget to tag me @lateladicarlottablog 🙏🏼

I prepared this workshop for an Italian printed collection about the Montessori method: Gioca e Impara con il Metodo Montessori curated by Grazia Honegger Fresco and published by Il Corriere della Sera and La Gazzetta dello Sport (the collection is only in Italian).

For the volume, I did the workshop with Arwen, Eli (10 years old) and Josh (14 years old); I then also proposed it to Oliver and Emily (then 5 and 3 years old).

To prepare it, I created a poster with red and green paper sheets: on the red half I wrote "NO (it's not OK!), on the green half I wrote "YES (it's OK!). I then printed images I found on the web that represented different kinds of consent.

• With the older kids, each person had a turn picking an image and positioning it according to whether or not it represented consent; we then discussed together why it's OK or not OK to do what we see in the picture. We had interesting conversations such as why a seemingly harmless scene like the prince waking up Snow White doesn't actually respect the rules of consent (we cannot kiss a person without their consent).
• With Oliver and Emily we did the same workshop, but before deciding where each image went, we described it together (looking at them through the kids' eyes, without imposing my own judgment / knowledge). Some images, such as the bullies one, aloowed us to introduce or deepen important conversations.

You can find the images we used for free in this PDF or find your own on the internet.