Earlier this month I posted about Women’s history month and shared the poster ETFO had shared. Poster I showed the poster to my history class of grade eight students and had each student read out one of the events. As we got closer and closer to 2023, students were getting more shocked of how recent each event was. Comments such as, “that was only twenty years ago!” or “that was only ten years ago!” were heard around the room.
After the students heard all of the events, students were asked to find a partner and then were asked to dig deeper into one of the topics from the poster. They each had 25-30 minutes to research and then had the rest of the class to share their findings. Each group presented and gave a summary of the topic. The conversations around the room were mostly shocked as they realized that our world was not “fair” for all until quite recently. It wasn’t until I shared that my mom did not have the same rights as men for most of her teens and twenties that the events on this poster really struck home.
As we get further into our history unit (Canada 1850-1890), it will be interesting to see how thinking about how far Canada still has to go to make things “fair”. I know these topics will come up throughout the rest of the year and I hope we can go back to these dates to further discuss each topic.
