This lesson plan is designed to be used in conjunction with Chalkline. Amnesty International worked in partnership with CILIP to award the Amnesty CILIP Honour commendation to one book from each of the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medal shortlists, that most distinctively illuminated, upheld or celebrated human rights.
Soldiers of the Kashmir Freedom Fighters are in search of new recruits at nine-year-old Rafiq’s school in rural Kashmir. They scrawl a line in chalk on the schoolroom wall. Any boy whose height reaches the line will be taken to fight. Rafiq is tall for his age and becomes the first boy to cross into a life of brutality and terrorism. So begins Rafiq’s transformation from child to boy soldier, indoctrinated into a cause of fanatical belief. But even when he no longer recognises himself, his family remembers the boy he was and hopes he will return.
