Activity 3 - School and Class Constitution

Objective:
The objective of this activity is to provide the children with an experience of making the constitution. How difficult it is to put things down on paper?

You could follow the following steps:

Step 1 – Discussion on the Constitution
– Generate a discussion on the Indian Constitution. The following questions could be dealt with:

· What is a Constitution?
· Why do we require a Constitution?
· What is there inside the Constitution?
· Who wrote the Constitution? Can we write our own Constitution?
· Can we change the Constitution? (Amendments)

Declare that the school has decided to experiment with making a constitution for the class, in which each and every student of the class would participate.

Step 2 – Values in the Constitution:
Share with the students that there are certain values enshrined in the Constitution, which are mentioned in the Preamble. Give a copy of the Preamble to children. Justice Leila Seth’s book, ‘We, the Children of India’ can also be distributed at this juncture. Find a copy of the preamble in Annexure 1 of this document. Its also printed on each NCERT textbook.

Have a discussion on the meaning of the values – Justice, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Sovereign, ‘Democratic’

Also, tell the children that the words ‘Socialist’ and ‘Secular were added to the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment.

Also have a discussion on the meaning of the word Republic as its Republic Day.


Step 3 – Create the Constitution
– Divide the class into groups of 5 and ask them to create a constitution. Give them pointers like these:

· Who will be the leader of the class? (monitor)
· What would the leader be called? (They could choose another name instead of a monitory. After all what is the need to ‘monitor’)
· What would be the roles and responsibilities of the leader?
· What would be powers of the leader?
· Who will maintain the cleanliness of the class and take on other responsibilities like notice boards etc?
· What will be the rights of the class citizens? What would be their responsibilities?

Let all the groups work individually and later the class gets together and finalises the ‘Class Constitution’.

Take photographs and record the discussions of children.

School Constitution
On a similar pattern, create a ‘School Constitution’. Take 2 students from each class and make a group which will from the school Constitution

Follow steps 1, 2 and 3 above. Just replace the school leader with a class leader. Other posts could include Sports Captain, House Captain – roles and responsibilities.
· The school could also create a Judiciary, which would decide the conflicts of children.