The Year 4 students have been focussing heavily on Global Goal number 1: No Poverty.

We started this journey by discovering exactly what poverty means. Each class played the “Living on 1 Dollar a day” role-play game. Students pretended they were living only 1 dollar a day. They ‘worked’ each day and couldn’t go to ‘school’. Every time they went to their ‘work’ they had to colour in their ‘health bars’. Each bar represented hunger, thirst, lack of hygiene and sickness. The more these bars were coloured in, the more ‘unhealthy’ they were becoming. The only way they could prevent their ‘health’ from getting worse was by buying food or medicine at the stations in the classroom. Water was free but it meant that they had to sacrifice going to ‘work’ that day because the well was a whole day’s trip. In theory, this sounds easy, but the Year 4 students soon realised it was quite difficult to buy food because they had to wait 5 days to afford to buy some (all the while their ‘hunger’ was getting worse and worse). At the end of the role-play, no one won the game… as hard as they tried. This taught them a valuable lesson because when people are living in these conditions in real life, there are no winners. It is impossible to live a healthy life-style under poverty. This lesson didn’t solve poverty… but it did help the students have a small idea about what it is like for millions of real people throughout our world. Hopefully, it also planted a seed in their hearts to grow up with a passion to do something about this problem. We mustn’t forget that these kids are our future and we need as many little people with big minds as we can get!