From our International Committee

The International Committee celebrates the wonderful diversity we have at St Mary’s, and what makes our school so unique.

This year we have had lots of amazing opportunities to engage in international activities. On Friday 12 February, as a School we celebrated Chinese New Year with an off-timetable day dedicated to discovering Chinese culture, traditions and history. Activities included calligraphy led by Mrs Skillings, Mandarin Coordinator, and lantern making and origami led by Miss Dutton, the International Coordinator.

As a committee, we have also organised and given presentations on topics ranging from Black History Month to World Wildlife Day to Holocaust Memorial Day. We like to keep the rest of our community informed about international events so we write and send out a termly newsletter to the school consisting of informative updates about current affairs, fun word searches and delicious recipes they can try. For another way for our peers to find out what’s going on around the globe, we put up a display with information of different international festivals occurring every month.

Eco-collaboration

We have also collaborated with the wonderful Environmental Action Group to create a set of challenges. These included writing a poem, song or short story telling others about climate, creating a collage of images which demonstrate the impact of climate change, recycling used materials to make something useful and beautiful, making a seasonable, sustainable, meat-free meal using locally produced ingredients, and creating an animal eco-warrior.

Many students came up with brilliant ideas and lots added an international twist to the challenges, by, for example, writing a verse of their song in a different language! The group has also put up a map in the dining room and annotated it with a tag for each country that a St Mary’s student is from. This is a beautiful way of seeing how diverse our community is, as well as learning fun facts about each country.

Advocacy action

To advocate education for all girls, we have created and presented assemblies to the whole school on the International Day of the Girl 2020, International Day of Education and International Day of Women in Science. This has reminded our students that not everyone has the privilege of such a high-quality of education that we enjoy.

As an all-girls’ school, it is our duty to promote gender equality and we did this by presenting an assembly to the whole school and posting short videos on our school’s social media with impactful messages such as, ‘All girls should have a say in their future #HearMeNow’.

This campaign is designed to empower young girls’ and women’s voices to work towards an equal future, shaped for and by girls. We also wrote a blog for the school website on this subject.
 
In the Summer Term, we look forward to creating a video about our school and what we’ve been up to and sending it to our sister school Loreto Mandeville Hall Toorak in Australia. It’s very exciting to collaborate with schools on the other side of the world!

Emma G. and Medeea G.

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