International Women's Day 2011

We put up the banners and signs - it's great to have resources from previous years.  Check out the entries here to see what they are!

Cheers

Ruth (who wore green today)

International Women's Day 2010

One of the advantages of banners and bookmarks and signs is that, when Annual Occasions roll around (eg. International Women's Day) you can do Same Song, Next Verse.

So we have our purple/green banners and bookmarks back in action, with women/girls able to sign the banners on Friday lunchtime.  This year's Year 7 students have been reading them over, and students here last year who signed them then have had fun finding their names again.

The signs (love that cornucopia of language about women) are back on the noticeboard.  I meant to do put up some ribbonry or some such, but you know, time has got away.

Our ever-useful bookcase has books about famous/heroic/achieving women, with some pictures of fine Australian women across the top.  This is one of the times when we do one face-out book per 'box' rather than lots for browsing.  Always good to change things around, make them look different, encourage a second look.

For more resources, try the International Women's Day site.

Cheers

Ruth

TGIF.  Gosh I'm tired.  Must be the mad pace of this term so far, the heat and humidity, the way it's felt a tad relentless...some days it feels like you're trying to run in glue, and the goal you're after keeps receding as you scoot from task to task to question to find to help to question to task to phone call to....  So many kids are so terrific - when they tell you about a book they've enjoyed, or you help them understand something that puzzled them, or tell you a story about their life that makes you chuckle, or like yesterday when one boy quite out of the blue got four strikes in a row at sport/tenpin and it was fabulous to see his achievement.  I've got so many great colleagues.  Plenty to be grateful for.  But right now, this morning, it's exhausting rather than invigorating.  TGIF! (Thank goodness it's Friday).

Good ideas for school libraries: 7. International Women's Day (including a banner)

I know it's past for this year, but it will come around next year...
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We had bookmarks, because as you know if you read this blog, bookmarks are something we do:
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The colours of IWD are the suffragette colours, green and purple.  Quote burgled from the IWD 2009 page for the front, link and library name on the back.

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Banners, with a twist.  Plain purple homespun cotton fabric ($6/metre from Spotlight).  Made as described yesterday.

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This is the foyer, including our lovely foyer bookcase/showcase, with various books about women.

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What's the writing?  As announced on the whole-school assembly, all the girls and women of our school were invited to sign the banners.  Interactivity!  We had lots of takers, as you can see - a busy lunchtime, and quite a few requests since then to be allowed to add names/messages.  And lots of people reading them.  We asked the signers to write something positive about girls/women.  Like I did:

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And I would like to report that it almost worked.  Some people slip in ads anywhere, don't they?

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What you need: Bookmarks: three colours of green paper, bookmark created in Microsoft Publisher using a fancy font from scrapvillage.com.

Banners: plain lilac homespun cotton, banner stuff as outlined in yesterday's blog entry, green marker pens (and whip out some black ones if two green ones aren't enough), old newspaper to put under the banner while it's being signed (the pen goes through), a slot on the school assembly...

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The girls liked signing.  The boys often wanted to know when International Men's Day was going to be (same month as Movember).  I know I could have let them sign too, but I guess a point was being made...

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Australian Women's Archives Project

To quote from the website:

Australian Women’s Archives Project

The National Foundation for Australian Women established the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) in 2000, to enhance public knowledge and appreciation of the contribution women and their organisations have made to Australia. To do this, the Project encourages Australian women and their organisations to preserve their records and to make them more accessible to academic, government and community-based researchers, to journalists, to school children as well as to the general enquirer.

AWAP is comprised of two elements:

an on-line Women’s Register, containing biographical data about Australian women and their organisations;
identification of suitable collections of records, and brokering of arrangements for the archiving of these records, in some cases contributing to the costs of indexing the records.
The searchable-on-line Register of the Archives Project is a valuable and growing source of biographical data about Australian women and their organisations, with hyper-links to the archival repositories where their records are held and to other sources of information. Women and women’s organisations are listed alphabetically. You’ll also be able to search by functional classification- P covers physicists, politicians, pharmacists, pacifists and many more.

There is a number of virtual exhibitions on-line (see the sidebar). These exhibitions recognise particular groups of women, such as those who were recipients of awards under the former Imperial Honours system. More virtual exhibitions are being developed.
The Register is a joint project of the National Foundation for Australian Women and the History Department of the University of Melbourne. The eScholarship Research Centre at the University provides technical assistance to the Project.

With the apology to the stolen generations scheduled for Federal Parliament this week, I was searching for information on Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Here's the AWAP page on her, to give you an idea of its comprehensive data.