Aye aye, Captain! All aboard our Pirate Ship!

Welcome to the Big Porridge & Play Online blog, where we share the stories of all the adventures
we’ve had during our virtual play sessions on Zoom! See below for details of how to join.

Saturday 7 November

This week’s Saturday session

We enjoyed another ENORMOUS play session on Saturday – with 28 families joining us!

🐶 🐅🦋 After an energetic dancing warm up and a lovely stretch, we met all kinds of animals in the FUNKY CHICKEN! Queen & Faly’s Dying Fly, Miracle & Michelle’s Silly Monkey, Junior’s Funky Tiger, Arshiyan’s Flying Fish, Affan’s Fat Tiger, Fateh Kamila & Saif’s Funky Dog, Anaya & Ayesha’s Funny Parrot, Adesire’s Funny Butterfly, Aroush’s Cat and Iona’s Sneaky Sparrow… Woweee! What amazing animals you came up with!

🚢 🏴‍☠️ We then boarded a mighty PIRATE ship – and met lots of captains! Captain Brown, Junior, Princess, Michris, Muhammed and Sulyman ordered us to do lots of things like… scrub the deck, climb the rigging, walk the plank, and… SHARK ATTACK

🌊🔮 Suddenly, the ship began to sink and we found ourselves under the sea! Iona spotted a MAGIC BALL so we swam and swam, got inside it and said the magic words. We undid our zips, and found ourselves… inside the stomach of a whale!

🐋 🐟 It smelt like rotten fish, and was very bouncy! Suddenly we heard the whale shouting “please get out of my tummy!” Junior suggested that we could get out by doing our shark attack action, and it worked! We dived out of the whale’s mouth, and Martha and Lorraine fed him a great big fish.

🍌 🍨 🦑 Then we swam down into a coral reef – and had a taste of it! It tasted like bananas, apples and strawberry ice cream, yum! We looked up and saw a great big jellyfish overhead, so we grabbed onto a tentacle and it took us back to the magic ball – phew! Another amazing adventure!

See you next week!
Iona 😊

Don’t forget to make your voice heard!

⭐  Which rights matter most to you and why?
⭐  Would you know what to do if your rights weren’t being respected?

Children have until Friday 20 November (International Children’s Day) to submit their views on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Incorporation Scotland Bill – which you can do here.

We can encourage children to think and talk about how they feel about their rights in lots of different ways – by finding out their thoughts through play, asking children questions, or encouraging them to use drawings or stories to tell us what they think and feel.

We’ve been using our Big Porridge & Play Online sessions to ask questions like the ones above, which you could also do as a family. You might want to also take a look at our Children’s Rights worksheets which encourage children to engage with the rights outlined in the UNCRC.

🖍️ Children’s Rights Worksheet One
🖍️ Children’s Rights Worksheet Two

Make sure your children have their say on their rights! Submit your views here by Fri 20 November.

WORKSHOP

A workshop with Adie Baako!

We are so excited that African dancer Adie Baako will be joining us on Saturday 21 November for a workshop of Ghanian dance and song, especially for the Licketyspit Children & Families Network! 🇬🇭🥁🎵

Adie grew up on the Atlantic coast in Ghana in a village with no electricity imagine, a life without wi-fi and iPads! – so singing, drumming and dancing was often the best way to entertain yourself. Now a professional dancer, Adie shares his stories and music in these fun, energetic workshops, bringing the vibrant culture and colour of Ghana to Scotland, where he now lives. Adie will join us in one of our Big Porridge & Play Online sessions, on Zoom – we can’t wait for a morning of 🎉 song, dance, stories and fun! 🎉