LifeSkills Handbook Activity 31
This is a single activity session plan from The Lifeskills Handbook. There are 61 activity sessions altogether. The handbook is available from our resources section where you’ll also find downloadable storybooks, books and posters to help you in your work.
LifeSkills Handbooks Activity 31
Peer Pressure
Purpose of Activity
To enable children to look at their attitudes and decisions about drugs and explore the risks of drug-taking
Life Skills: Critical Thinking
Important Points
Before or after this session, do or repeat communication skills activities such as Activity 19: You and I.
Materials
- Large sheets of paper
- Coloured pens
Steps
- Tell this scenario to the whole group: You meet some friends. Some of them begin to smoke marijuana. Your good friend decides to try it and wants you to join in too.
- Ask for ideas on what might lead you to try it. Make a list of these and divide the ideas to show if these pressures are from the outside (from other people) or the inside (from yourself).
- Outside
- Friends
- Advertisements
- Seeing people in films
- Songs
- Having parents or relatives who drink or smoke to a level where there is a problem
- Inside
- Feeling lonely
- Having problems at home
- Wanting to be part of the group
- Wanting to show that I’m grown up
- Not knowing who to ask for help with problems
- Outside
- Divide Children into groups and give each group one of the situations below (use local words for drugs).
Situations
- Life has been difficult for you. There are problems at home and you depend more and more on your friends. Someone that is a friend of yours tells you that he has something you can take that will make you feel 100 times better.
- You keep hearing stories about cocaine which say that it makes you feels great. You are curious and want to try it to see what happens. One day a friend offers you some.
- You meet your friends. They are with a man who you don’t know. He shows you a pill which he says ‘will make you feel like a new person’. He says that they give you a good time and are totally safe and that he will give you one free.
- In the groups, draw a picture with a title, ‘If only…’ About what happens in the story. These stories could also be turned into raps (a spoken song with a beat), songs or poems.
- Ask the children to discuss how they would react. Refer to Activity 19: You and I.
- How will you react to this situation?
- What problems might you have in refusing?
- What consequences might you face if you accept? (Remind children of the three C’s of decision-making)
- If another person refused before you, would this help you? Why?
- What identity factors will strengthen you or weaken you?
- Can practising, ‘No’ help in real life? Why/why not?
Follow-up
Act out more roleplays using real problems and situations from the children to practice dealing with different situations.