Wow! What a week we had last week! We had three guest speakers visit us over the last week and a half. We have certainly been learning a lot about Children's Rights and the many ways they impact our lives.
We started with a visit from Saúl Schkolnik, author of a children's book on children's rights. Mr. Schkolnik entertained us with many different stories about when he was younger and writing his books as well as answered many questions that we had about why he wrote his books. Mr. Schkolnik reminded us to care about many things around us, children, the world, the environment, etc. It was great to meet such an important Chilean author!
Our second visitor was Maria Jose Lemaitre who works for the Ministry of Education. Ms. Lemaitre shared many different numbers and statistics about the state of education here in Chile. Most importantly, she highlighted the various requirements that schools have with respect to children's rights to education. It was great to gain a deeper understanding about our topic from the perspective of the government. We look forward to gathering more information from Ms. Lemaitre!
Our third visitor last week was Sergio Rodrígues Tramolao from the organisation called Opción. He gave a general overview of children's rights and connected that information to what has been happnening here in Chile since the adoption of the rights 20 years ago. In his discussion he highlighted what has been done in Chile and gave suggestions on what still needs to happen here to fulfill the goal of children's rights for all children in the country. He ended his presentation with a slide show with many different statistics about children in Chile and invited all the students to go to his organisation's website (http://www.opcion.cl) and enter or vote for the question that they are most interested in regarding children's rights. Voting on these questions is one way that students will be able to have a "voice" in the government because the results of the survey will be presented to the government at a later date. We are really looking forward to seeing Mr. Tramolao again this week for a special student workshop on children's rights and violence.
Please view the slideshow on the right for all of the pictures from our guest speakers!
I look forward to hearing your comments about our guest speakers and everything you learned during their presentations!
Miss Jessica
