Make Your Voice Heard like Shirley Chisholm

Shirley Chisholm was the first African-American woman to serve in the United States Congress. She was outspoken and brave. She fought for equal rights for women, minorities, immigrants, and the poor. Serving seven terms (14 years) in Congress, Chisholm said she didn’t want to be remembered as the first woman or African American to do something. She wanted to be remembered as someone who “had guts.

The children thought about how they could make their voices heard like Shirley Chisholm.

Each day at Morning Meeting, the Trees Class practice expressing their ideas by answering a question and taking a vote.

Would you like to sneeze cheese or laugh jelly beans?

Would you want to be able to fly or be invisible?

Then they had a chance to make a self portrait, drawn with their mouths open… ready to speak their mind!

Also in the Studio, children learned about sharing what they have to say. They stepped up to a “podium” and used different voice projectors to say something that they wanted everyone to hear.

Shirley Chisholm started as a Preschool school teacher and was an advocate for education during her career. In the Studio at Drama, the children built a school with blocks and pretended to be a teacher.

In Blocks the children looked at photos of Shirley Chisholm in Brooklyn where she was born. They thought about ways to represent what they saw.

Then the building began!