TRADITIONAL FOLK GAMES FOR THE UNIVERSAL CHILDREN’S DAY

Ulapane Maha Vidyalaya, under the guidance of Women’s Development Centre (WDC), organized a festival of traditional folk games with the participation of 330 students at the school's premises. The festival of traditional folk games was organized on 1^st of October, 2012 celebrating Universal Children’s day. 

Ulapane Maha Vidyalaya was introduced to WDC by the department of Education as a problematic school that needed facilitation and guidance. Thus, WDC, with the support of the Shining Life Child Trust (SLCT),  started to play the role of a facilitator in upgrading the standard of the school through a variety of projects. The special education unit of Ulapane Maha Vidyalaya is also run by WDC. 

It is a known fact that due to the mechanization of the society, children of today have greater access to technology and they tend to focus more on computer games and video games rather than traditional forms of play. This has taken away their creativity, thinking capacity and has promoted selfishness, individuality and lack of collectivity.

Focusing on all these aspects, Women’s Development Centre guided Ulapane Maha Vidyalaya to encourage children to play traditional folk games throughout Universal Children’s Day. The event was successful as the children enjoyed it and learnt the importance of playing such games almost for the first time in their lives.

Most of the children were ignorant about these games at the beginning of the festival but under the instructions of the teachers, they got used to all the games within a short time period and enjoyed playing 10 traditional folk games including “Eluwan Kaama, Thachchu paneema, onchili waram”, etc.

The objectives behind encouraging the children to play these games were to teach them the importance of collective effort rather than individuality, the strength of working as a group, truthfulness, helping the fellow members in the times of threat, facing challenges in life, knowledge about traditional currency and traditional words.

Furthermore, it was identified by WDC that rather than talking about children only on Universal Children’s day, it is more important to teach them something practical, which they would remember throughout their lives. Therefore, playing traditional games, building relationships with each other was recognized by WDC as a significant aspect.

In addition, by making them engage in these traditional folk games, it was also expected to make them free from discrimination including gender bias, ethnic and age discrimination. In a time where children try to engage in violent games such as shooting, hitting, killing through video games, WDC identified the importance of introducing the traditional folk games for the community through which the relationships between adults were expected to be enriched through the intervention of children.