As you may already know, March is Women’s History Month and we are taking advantage of that fact here in Casa Búho to educate our students a little bit more about the powerful women in history.
On Monday, we played it cool and spent the whole afternoon reading and having fun at La Fogata as a part of our vacation program. We also took some time to watch the Capitan Escudo, (an Ecuadorian national comic hero), video short to get the kids in the mood to enter in a drawing competition of Capitan Escudo.
To start off the month of mujeres, women, we focused on women in science, technology, and nature. On Tuesday, with the help of the book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo we introduced one of my personal heroes, Jane Goodall. The students were fascinated by her discovery of over 20 sounds that chimps use to communicate. In order to encourage their writing abilities, we are creating a board of all the women we learn about throughout the month with little posters about each figure that the students have to fill out with facts about her. We then made our own little monkey and chimpanzee collages.
On Wednesday, we began a new project titled “Misión: Investigación” (Mission: Research) for a handful of our most faithful students. Partnering with a local organization that provides the use of computers to the community, the students were paired up and assigned a powerful woman in history. They learned how to use the mouse, open up a webpage and after just a few minutes, were already hard at work researching about the new female figures. At the end of the month we are eager to hold a presentation in which each group of students introduces their character. This project is important in teaching students how to research and combine information in an intelligent way as well as teaching them about powerful, and often overlooked leaders in history.
On Friday we read about Lydia Huayllas, the leader of an indigenous group of Bolivian women, who have started to climb some of the highest peaks in South America to prove the stereotypes about them wrong. To keep with the theme of South America, and with one of our larger groups in a while, we made and decorated our very own llamas!
