International Day of the Girl

As of 2011 the UN has declared that October 11th is International Day of the Girl Child. The 2015 theme as set out by the UN is The Power of the Adolescent Girl: Vision for 2030. This week during our meeting we made art featuring our positive traits and learned about overlooked women in STEM fields.  The women we learned about are:

• Caroline Herschel--the first woman to discover a comet (she would discover eight in total) and a winner of a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society.
• Mary Anning--she discovered the ichthyosaurus, long-necked plesiosaurs, a pterodactyl and up to thousands of other fossils that have helped create a picture of the marine world during the Jurassic period.
• Maria Mitchell--at seventeen she started a school to teach girls math and science.  An avid astronomer she was the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the first female professor of astronomy in the United States.
• Mary Somerville--defying her father's wishes at fourteen she took up the study of alegbra and mathematics.  She later would perform studies on magnetism and wrote papers on astronomy, chemistry, physics and mathematics.  She may be best know for her translation of Pierre-Simon Laplace’s The Mechanism of the Heavens.
  

Here are some ideas on how to celebrate International Day of the Girl Child and while helping to further the rights of women and girls in Canada and throughout the world.

We look forward to the continuing these conversations with the Guides in the coming weeks.