Women's History Month Activity

You and Others: Learn About Leadership in a Group (YaO1)

This is a meeting we did a couple of years ago during Women's History Month as part of the Famous Five Challenge (Member Zone log-in) and Women's History Challenge (pdf file), which is no longer available.

Option 1 of the Women's History Challenge was to create a Women's History Wall of Fame. I found a website called Famous Canadian Women, which has the birthdates of a lot of Canadian women. I matched the birthdates of my Guides to the birthdate of a famous Canadian woman. I made myself a master copy (Word doc) of the information about the woman, and I made a document (Word doc) that listed the women, birthdates and accomplishments.

I cut out the short descriptions and cut them into shapes (circles, triangles, rectangles) and backed them with colourful construction paper in the same shape, but slightly larger.

At the meeting, I hung up a large piece of Bristol board on wall. Then I read out a birthdate and had the girls identify themselves if it matched theirs. We handed them the name to attach to the poster, and then they had to write their year of birth and something about themselves that they were good at or liked about themselves. While they were doing this, I read the short bio of the famous woman they were connected to.  As it was Women's History month, when we finished, we left the poster on the wall of the school cafeteria where we meet, so the other students could see what we accomplished. (YaO1#4)

The other activity was to do a skit, so I tied this to the Famous Five Challenge (pdf file), which provided some skits. I handed out the three skits to the girls to practice and learn and present. The skits provided the information they would need to answer the questions required in the challenge.

I also had the Word Search from the Famous Five Challenge on the tables for them to work on when they arrived.

I really enjoyed doing our Wall of Fame poster--it was one of those cases where I learn just as much as (or more than!) the girls who were doing the activity.

(this post was inspired by a conversation I had with @girlguidesofcanada today on Twitter, which also contributed to their blogpost Women's History Month)