The Block Flock followes the everyday life of a groups of school friends, their siblings and sidekick spiritual animals.
The tone of voice is wacky and entertaining. Their world views are explored in daily situations through the lens of childish wisdom, conflict and innocence.
The Block Flock carries stories about diversity, acceptance and ultimate friendship.
(Nine) distinct kids who encourage a sense of curiosity, self-esteem and compassion through daily situations.
Every character has a different personality from the positive to the negative ones we all share. The characters are also accompanied by spirit animal sidekicks that resemble their owners that they are entrusted with and must care for. Through this relationship, the characters and their sidekicks communicate and reveal their attitudes, opinions and behavior to those around them.
Therefore, introspection is an important aspect and skill for children to learn.
The characters are 6-10 years old and every character learns valuable life lessons individually while developing shared life experiences.
Some of the characters:
Preview of Relationship Dynamics
Children can develop prejudices from an early age, but they also begin to understand concepts such as justice and empathy from an early age.
Working with a child psychologists we have developed the traits most common for children age 6-10.
“The Block Flock” – recommendations and thoughts of a child psychologist (extract)
In the Malu & Friends project, through the stories of eight characters, diversity and acceptance of diversity are discussed. The whole concept could be largely adapted to children of primary school age – from 6 to 10-11 years and for the purpose of learning about differences between people: different characteristics of different people, different life circumstances and environments from which different people come and how it shapes their behaviours, thoughts and feelings. Due to the above, this concept could be a good material in the prevention of violent and undesirable behaviour of children and young people at an age when various prejudices develop and when they adopt undesirable patterns of communication.
Through a wide range of different characteristics, personality traits, behaviours, habits, environments and other circumstances in which the characters find themselves, this project can be extremely useful in getting to know and better understand others, but also yourself. Through interesting and rich characterizations of the characters, on the one hand, children can learn a lot about the behaviours of others, and on the other hand, they can also recognize themselves in a certain character and thus additionally become aware of their own behaviours, etc.
Feelings
It would be good to pay special attention to the different feelings that the characters face, and which are faced by the target audience of this project too, and these children are on the verge of puberty – sadness, anger, rage, shame, confusion, alienation, pride, enthusiasm, joy, euphoria and similar. Throughout the whole concept, it would be good to be especially aware of certain feelings, their physical signs, situations that triggered certain feelings, etc. In this way, emotional literacy is strengthened in children, which is very important for getting to know oneself and establishing quality relationships. Also, it is important to send the message that all feelings are fine and that none of them are bad, some are just annoying, but even those unpleasant ones have their importance and purpose.
Environment
Through the personal stories of the characters, the environment from which one comes and some of his history that he went through can be treated in particular. Therefore, someone may be coming from a more difficult situation that makes it harder for them to cope with some challenges. Through the life of an individual character, children can discover why someone behaves the way they behave, that is, that our environment shapes us as we are today to some extent (but the environment cannot prevent us from working on ourselves and being better).
Character’s pets
A special role in this project is played by the pets of the characters – animals that are always somewhere near the character. They can play an interesting role. At first they provide security, unconditional support and friendship to characters going through different situations … They can serve as someone to whom the character will confide and thus express himself, his feelings, what makes him happy or what bothers him. Furthermore, through simple questions or stimuli, pets can encourage characters to think more deeply about themselves, the situations in which they found themselves, and the ways in which they behaved at the time. Thus, the characters in a way get an incentive to introspect, think about themselves, and then to build an image of themselves.
