A walk to school through Balata

We sent out a request for snippets of video to add to our Walking to School video that we are hoping to make. Our video will hopefully show that we are happy to be at school and ask why can't all girls be this happy too. Wouldn't it be great if all girls in the world had the same opportunity that school can give?

We were sent this fabulous video from Abdullah at the Yafa Cultural Centre in the Balata camp in Palestine. His students really upped the ante! Have a look at the video. We think it will make you think a bit more positively about where you live.

Thank you Salah, Nisreen, Farah, Roa'a, Alaa' and Abdullah.

Skyping Plans

We are hoping to Skype with the following schools:

* Catholic Medical School in Sarajevo.
* Centre for Peacebuilding in Sanski Most.
* Yafa Cultural Centre in Balata.
* Alexandru cel Bun College in Romania.

We hope to talk to them about our NGO - Empowering girls, Asking them questions such as:

* Is education free in your country?
* Is there any girls who do not attend school in your country?
* Do many girls go to college in your country?
* How are girls treated in mixed schools in your country?

The Girl Effect

What happens when you educate a girl? Watch.....





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How lucky are we to be in school?

After the screening of Girl Rising some members of Radio TY caught up with TY's, 1st and 2nd Years to ask them their thoughts after seeing the film.

listen to ‘Educating Girls Awareness Week’ on Audioboo

Listen here to some 1st Years who feel inspired to do something about the issue!

listen to ‘1st years are inspired to act!’ on Audioboo

See our project blogs - A Girl Friendly World at http://agirlfriendlyworld.blogspot.ie and Calíní Saor at  http://cornarotyngo.blogspot.ie/

Action!

When we were watching Girl Rising we watched the 'Walking to School' video. This inspired us to make our own, but we decided to expand to a video about our school day. We are also trying to get footage from other schools.

Here's a teaser. Enjoy!

                                              

After film survey results

At our recent screening of Girl Rising to the first years we asked them to complete a survey after the movie.
This was to test to see if they had enjoyed the film. We also wanted to know would they be inspired to take action on the issue.


The three questions were:
1. Did you enjoy the film? yes/no
2. Did you find the film - boring / inspirational / interesting
3. Would you be inspired to take action on this issue? yes / no


Survey results:


55 people said yes they enjoyed the film- 98%
1 girl said they didn't enjoy the film-2%
1 girl found the film boring-2%
32 girls found the film interesting-57%
23 girls found the film inspirational-41%
53 girls said they would be inspired to take action on this issue-95%

3 girls said they wouldn't be inspired to take action on this issue-5%


Overall we think the first years enjoyed the film and would take action on this issue. We also think we raised awareness with first years as the percentages were very high.

Survey Results

At our recent screeneing of Girl Rising to first year we asked them to complete a survey before the movie.
This was to test to see if they had read our poster that we had put around the school. If they got the answers right this means we had raised awareness.

The three questions were:
1.How many girls globally are out of education?
2.How much does an extra year of education add to your income?
3.How many girls under 18 will be married every 30 seconds?

Overall 27% got all 3 questions right. But on a question by question basis the percentages were much higher.

71% knew there were 66 million girls out of education.
48% knew an extra year of education added 20% to a girls income as an adult.
77% knew that every 30 seconds 13 girls are married.

Overall we think we have raised awareness among our first years. As these were difficult statistics to remember and they would not have known them unless they had read our posters.

We had a draw for any girl who got all 3 questions right. Dearbhla Byrne from class Clarke won and was presented with a prize.

Walking to school

We used this short film as the crowds were coming into the Demo Room for the film,



And this one as they were leaving the room after the show.



We hope to make our own version of this film :)

We got all our screening tools here. Find out more about the Girl Rising film and how you can get involved at www.girlrising.com

Raising Awareness

We watched the film Girl Rising (thanks to Intel Ireland for arranging to have the film sent from America for us). To advertise our awareness week and how important educating girls is, we put posters up around the school with statistics and quotes from the film.

Here are some of our posters:

Our christmas test

To assess how we had done our initial research for our NGO our teachers decided to set us an Apprentice type test, which would actually be a workshop, for Christmas. We were given the task two weeks ahead of our test and we had to plan and prepare for the workshop. On the day we had 2 hours to get our poster made and make a presentation / pitch to the teacher. We also had to write a rationale for our poster and campaign. 

Here is the task we were set.

And here are some of our finished posters.

 

Our Research on Conflict and Children

The area of conflict that affects children most notably is the way in which they are used as soldiers. Over half of the worlds child soldiers are in Africa. The end credits of the movie 'Blood Diamond' state that "there are still 200,000 child soldiers in Africa", some of these children are orphaned by AIDS and have no alternatives apart from partaking in warfare. Others have been tricked into joining, been forced into it due to extreme poverty, been sold by there parents or been kidnapped.
We had been drawn to this topic after we watched this disturbing online documentary on civil war in Liberia which illustrated the effects on children that followed conflict. (It is pretty gruesome so beware).

We found a video of a girl who knows a great song about the Millennium Development Goals. Listen to it below: