Wednesday, April 7, 2010

April 7th Meeting


15 Students attended today's meeting. Our Agenda included getting t-shirt order forms out, starting planning for an international movie night, finishing our dream catchers and working on cultural research projects.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

March 24th Meeting


19 students attended our meeting this week. We wrapped up our H20 walk for life service learning project. Did the initial glue work for our dream catchers wrapped up our time working on our North American cultural research project.

Monday, March 22, 2010

H2O for Life Walk is a Success


Over 30 students took part in the H2O Walk for Life today. We walked to raise awareness and money to help a school in Guatemala improve access to clean water. The students hiked 6km carrying 6 liters of water to gain empathy for children around the world who must make such treks daily to provide water for their families.

The students did an outstanding job today. They helped others, challenged themselves and represented well for our schools. One woman not involved in the walk summed it up when she came over to the kids and said, "I think your wonderful."

This was a combined effort of the Middle School International Club, High School International Club and High School Spanish Club.

Here are various images of the day. Note the smiles.




Sunday, March 21, 2010

March 17th Meeting



18 students had a busy meeting finalizing our H20 walk for life plan. We viewed a slide show about the school in Guatemala and answered many student questions. We're excited to work with the High School International Club and Spanish club on this project.

Starting our dream catcher project was the next order of business. We read the Dakota story of the dream catchers origins. One interesting point was that the webbing in the Dakota story caught the good letting the bad pass through. Ms. Hallin shared that in the Ojibwa version the webbing catches the bad and lets the good go through. We were interested to see that culturally the same object was viewed differently.

Our snacks for the day came from Mexico. We had cookies, pumpkin seeds and salty, spicy tamarind fruit snacks.

Our final activity was to move forward on our cultures of North America project.

Friday, March 12, 2010

March 10th Meeting

21 students and Ms. Collopy, one of our Geography teachers, attended our meeting this week. Our first order of business was to pass out pledge sheet for our H2O Walk for Life event comming up on March 22nd. We are teaming with the High School International Club to raise both funds and awareness around access to clean water. The funds we raise will go to support the Guatemalan school pictured below.


Next we agreed on a design for our club T-Shirt. It will be a blue shirt printed with a green Earth map. The top of the shirt will say IGH International Club. "We are the World" will be printed under the map. Students will use puff paint to mark places on the globe that they have connections to.

At snack time the students enjoyed a Somali cake and cookies from Italy. The leaders were impressed that the students could predict that an African store would sell Italian cookies because of past colonialism.

Our final activity engaged the students in a dialog about race. Students learned that humans come in a continuum of colors instead of black, red, yellow and white. We also introduced the concept of race as a social construct.






Our next meeting will be March 17th. Our goal is to finalize our h2O for life plans, start T-shirt orders and work on our North American cultures research starting with a dream catcher making activity. See you there.

Monday, March 8, 2010

March 10th Meetings Agenda.


We have another exciting day planned. First, we will work to finalize our involvement in H2o for Life. Our event day for this is March 22nd. Second, we will be coming up with our club t-shirt design for the year. Later, we will be doing a hand painting activity that looks at race. We will also be working on our North American culture project. And, snacks, did I mention snacks will be of international origin.

We hope to see everyone there. New students are welcome too!

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Show Me The Money


In the picture above 19 students are showing off actual paper currency from around the the world. Student introduced themselves and shared the country of origin for their money. We briefly identified where each country was on Earth.

Once this was done we had a conversation about teaming with the High School International Club to participate in their H2O for Life Campaign. The goal of this project would be to raise awareness and funds for clean water around the world. Students will walk 6km carrying 6L of water to mimic the daily water gathering chores of many children around the world. The kids decided unanimously to take part in this project.

Next we reviewed some of our key vocabulary, ethnicity, culture and social Justice

The students then participated in an activity where they looked at different characteristics of people to decide if these characteristics put them in an "up" or "down" group. "Up" groups receive privilege for this characteristics where "down" groups either see no privileged or feel oppression. For example males would be an "up" group while females would be a "down" group. The students did a wonderful job.

After snack, the students started a continuing project of exploring culture around the world. First we will focus on the many cultures in North America.

Our next meeting will be on March 10th. Both Mr. Anderson and Ms. Hallin are off campus at meetings on March 3rd.

Another great meeting!

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

2-17 Second Meeting Was Fun

Great turn out. 23 students attended our club meeting today. We started the meeting with introductions. We also reviewed the clubs purpose in an ever shrinking world. Next we discussed three vocabulary items, social justice, ethnicity and race.

Our snacks for the day were Chinese Cookies and coconut in honor of the new Year of the Tiger.

Here students are marking their historic ethnicity on a map of the world. We also brainstormed how we would promote ethnic pride in our school. The picture below is of the the whole group of students.

We promised the kids we would do a silly picture as a way of getting them to sit still in the picture above.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Feb. 10, 2010 First Meeting of the School year.

We had a great first meeting of the year today. Eight students participated in a mapping activity where each individual identified countries that they were connected to ethnically or culturally. Our group connected to 36 points on the map, illustrating the importance of developing intercultural skills.

In the activity pictured below we explored the distribution of wealth in the United States. Each student represented 10% of the nations population and each chair equaled 10% of the nations wealth. We learned that the most wealthy student (10%) had 7 chairs to sit in while the other 9 students (90%) needed to share the remaining 3 chairs. We concluded the activity with a discussion about why some have more than others. Did the students think it was fair?

Here we are on the computers teaching the students to access our blog.


The last picture is of the students being goofy. Who wins the funny face contest?