LifeSkills Handbook Activity 39

Steps

1. Divide group into groups of five or six.
2. Ask each group to sit in a circle. Begin the activity by saying the phrase. ‘Mr Nje gets angry when someone calls him stupid names.’ Ask one child in the circle to repeat this phrase and add another reason why Mr Nje asks angry. The next child in the circle repeats these two and adds another and so on until all the children in the circle have added a reason. (This is an adaptation of a memory game!).
3. Other ‘anger’ ideas are:
   • when someone shouts at him
   • when someone steals something from him
   • when people ignore him
   • when someone pushes into him
   • when he is hungry and has no money for food
4. Ask children to think back to the last time they got angry. In pairs, ask them to describe this to a friend without saying names and without saying what happened when they got angry, like this: I got angry yesterday when someone pointed at me and laughed at my clothes.
5. Ask each child to describe their partner’s reason for getting angry. Write these on a flip chart. If an idea is repeated, do not write it twice but put a tick next to the first reason.
6. Ask children to think of the two reasons that that made them the angriest. Each child comes up to the list and (with the help of the educator if necessary), places a tick beside each of their two top reasons.