Girl Issues: Child Marriage

*Reminder: these posts are written by the class as a shared writing activity.  The words and sentence structures are their own thoughts.  (They impress me all the time.)

Girl Issues

We have been working on a big project for a teacher program called TakingITGlobal.  This project focus' on social justice.  As a class we decided to take action on a problem which is occurring in some parts of the world.  The problem we are addressing is child marriage.  Child marriage is when children, mostly girls, are married at a young age.  As a result girls are being made to drop out of school, and have babies when they are still children themselves.  Many girls die during childbirth or develop health problems such as Fistula. Fistula is a problem with your bladder.  See video below from becauseiamagirl.ca.

We are holding a pink lemon-aid fundraiser; the money raised will go to the Because I Am a Girl organization.  The assembly will inform the school about child marriage, and the fundraiser.  There is a group writing and producing a PSA (public service announcement) about this issue.  They are hoping to show it at our assembly, but are not sure it will be ready in time.  There is a group that has written a pitch for our action to share with teachers to inform them about what our class is doing and how our class is taking initiative.

Picture of our silence sense poetry

On April 16th we participated in the Free the Children Day of Silence.  We wrote sense poetry about silence, and posted them on a wall outside of our classroom.  In the afternoon we watched Girl Rising.  Two chapters in the film were about child marriage.  It really surprised some students how un-affectionate some parents could be to their daughters.