Session on Inter-personal Skills: An Intervention Involving Role Plays

During this session, we planned to organize with the children some role-plays to help them tackle social situations they can encounter. Through this little game, we want to have them engaged so they could develop inter-personal skills and reflections about the consequences of their actions. Our goal was also to sensitize them to specific meetings where the lack of tolerance on their part could lead to harmful feelings with the people surrounding them.

We implemented two situations: the first one was about a new girl arriving at school. We asked them how they would react, what they would say and what interactions they would suggest, so the new girl can be quickly involved in the class. This was really interesting to see that among the SMILE students, the girls were really eager to participate. It was possibly easier for them to imagine such situation and project themselves in it. We had multiple suggestions from the students: speak to the new girl to become friend, share some food with her, play a game so they can have fun together, but also ask her to present herself to help know her better. We encouraged the SMILE students to come individually in front of everybody to explain what they could do, to facilitate the development presentations skills and confidence-building.

The second situation was a little scene theater we wanted to organize with 5 volunteers in the class. An important point to highlight is that this session was conducted in a small group, after Diwali. A smaller group enabled them to feel more comfortable to play the role game because they were less shy in front of a smaller audience. The scene was: "the new girl in class was trying to join a game in the playground, what do you do?" The 5 students who volunteered were briefed about the situation outside the class to prepare it, and then, they played it in front of the others. It was funny because it pushed them to improvise a bit, and be able to deal with some of the uneasy feeling of not being able to control everything. But it was amazing to observe how the children tried to include the new girl in their game and interact with her. After that, 5 others students were called to volunteer to play the scene again in a different manner.

To finish this session, we introduced the idea of "The 3 magic words". We explained them how these useful words will always help them in life: "Thank you", "Please" and "Sorry". Further, a fourth word, related to the session of the day, was introduced: "You are welcome". These words seemed to resonate well with the kids. They were able to clearly express the correct usage of these words, and in fact were able to link them well with the role-play situation. Through observations of their behaviors, we believe that they enjoyed playing and were very excited about it. The little role play pushed them out of their comfort zone and we have seen slight improvements in term of confidence and communication abilities. We hope it helped develop some amount of social sensitivity and an increased ability to deal with such difficult situations!