Purposeful Play: Coaching with meaning in June

Running low on ideas? Let June's Global Days inspire powerful coaching sessions with your clients!

As Play Based Coaches, we know that play is not a break from learning. It’s how children learn best but even the most experienced coaches can hit a creative wall.

This June, the world is observing several powerful international days that bring awareness to issues affecting children and their wellbeing. These commemorations are not just dates on a calendar but they’re entry points for your coaching conversations, building emotional literacy, enhancing critical thinking, and inspiring personal growth in the children you coach.

Take the opportunity to turn each global day into a meaningful, playful, and skills-based session with the children you support:

🕊️ June 4 – International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression

Themes: Safety, voice, and emotional healing
Activity: “Safe Spaces Mapping”
Ideas: Use drawing or storytelling to help children map their personal “safe zones”. Either real or imagined. Introduce role-play using toys or puppets to explore how to ask for help, express fear, or stand up for themselves.

Prompt questions: 

* What makes you feel safe?
* Who keeps you safe?
* What can you do to keep yourself safe?

Skill Transfer: Boundaries, emotional literacy, advocacy, trauma sensitivity

🌍 June 5 – World Environment Day

Themes: Responsibility, systems thinking, and future-focused action
Activity: “Build-a-World Challenge”
Ideas: Provide recycled materials, blocks, or natural objects and ask children to create their ideal world.                                                                                                                         Prompt questions:

* What does your world need to stay clean and happy?
* Who takes care of the environment in your world?
* What happens when someone forgets their responsibility?

Skill Transfer: Environmental awareness, cause and effect, accountability, group collaboration

🍎 June 7 – World Food Safety Day

Themes: Health, responsibility, and informed choices
Activity: “Kitchen Detective Game”
Ideas: Create a playful mystery game where children “investigate” a pretend kitchen scene with items like spoiled food, hygiene mishaps, or unsafe practices. They solve the clues to make the kitchen safe again.                                                                                                   Prompt questions:

* How do we keep our minds and bodies healthy?
* What does being responsible mean when no one is watching?

Skill Transfer: Critical thinking, responsibility, health awareness, problem-solving

🧸 June 11 – International Day of Play (UN’s World Day of Play)

Themes: Emotional release, social connection, unstructured creativity
Activity: “Free Play Power Hour”
Ideas: Let the child choose the direction of play with no coaching structure and no rules. Prompt questions:

* What did you enjoy most?
* When do you feel free to play?
* What do adults forget about play?

Skill Transfer: Self-expression, autonomy, emotional safety, play as a regulation tool

❌ June 12 – World Day Against Child Labour

Themes: Rights, fairness, and values
Activity: "Work vs. Play Sorting Game”
Ideas: Create picture cards that show different tasks (e.g., playing, helping with chores, working in a factory, going to school). Have children sort them into “Child’s Role” or “Not Fair.” Prompt questions:

* Why is some work for children okay and some is not?                                                              * Why is play a child's work?
* Is it okay to help with chores at home?

Skill Transfer: Values-based reasoning, empathy, understanding rights and justice

🧳 June 20 – World Refugee Day

Theme: Empathy, identity, and belonging
Activity: “Suitcase of Me”
Ideas: Invite children to imagine they had to leave home suddenly. What would they take in a small suitcase? Use drawings, objects, or pictures.                                                             Prompt questions:

* What’s important to you?
* How would you feel leaving home suddenly?
* What helps someone feel welcome in a new place?

Skill Transfer: Empathy, identity exploration, resilience, global awareness

🚫 June 26 – International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking

Theme: Choices, self-worth, and peer pressure
Activity: “Hero in the Mirror”
Ideas: Use superhero capes or mirrors and ask children to decorate or describe their inner hero. hen introduce pretend peer pressure scenarios (age-appropriate) and role-play how their hero self responds.                                                                                                        Prompt questions:

* What’s important to you?
* What would a super hero do if somebody offered them drugs or alcohol?
* What would you do if somebody offered you drugs or alcohol?                                                * What makes you strong on the inside? 

Skill Transfer: Self-esteem, decision-making, boundary-setting, resisting peer pressure

These international days are more than awareness campaigns. They are opportunities to coach children into emotionally intelligent, socially responsible, and self-aware individuals. By using play as your tool, you help children process complex themes in age-appropriate ways that transfer far beyond the session.

🎯 Remember:

* Keep it light but meaningful
* Let the child lead where possible
* Always circle back to safety, connection, and skill-building

Let June be a month where play becomes power and your coaching makes a difference that lasts.