Guest Speaker Workshops

We are so grateful to all of the parents and mentors who have helped us find even more guest speakers to come and help us find information for our inquiries about Children's Rights.

This week we have three workshops planned with guest speakers on specific topics related to inquiry groups in each of the classrooms.

Monday we had a psychologist come and discuss the affects on children when their rights are denied. In particular he focused on what happens when children are abused or discriminated against and what causes the abuse to occur.

On Wednesday we are going to have a judge come and discuss the effects on people when the rights of children are violated. She will be discussing laws that are already passed as well as ideas for laws that Chile needs to adopted to further the development of Children's Rights here in this country.

On Thursday we will have a visit from a representative from UNICEF who will speak with us regarding the role of UNICEF in general as well as here in Chile. He will focus on what his organisation does to preserve Children's Rights as well as ideas that they have to continue to educate others about Children's Rights in the future.

I encourage you to discuss what will be happening this week with your friends and family and develop some questions that you would like to ask these speakers. You can either ask the questions yourself if you are going to the workshop, or pass your questions to a student who is attending the workshop for your class.

Lastly, please feel free to leave any comments that you have about these speakers and their workshops. In particular, were they helpful? Why or why not? What could we do next year to make these workshops even more useful? Would you like more workshops or more whole level guest speakers? Who was the most helpful?

Looking forward to your comments!
Miss Jessica

Fantastic Guest Speakers!

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