Inspirational People Review

As mentioned previously, last term we started reading some books on inspirational women as I want my girls to feel as though they can pretty much do whatever they set their minds too, same as these amazing ladies have done. These ladies have something else in common, despite their backgrounds they haven't "settled", they have followed their passion and in some cases their calling  from God, and gone on to happily achieve some amazing things.

To-date we have covered Helen Keller, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Earhart, and Dian Fossey. We were going to start on the magnificent Mother Theresa today but the girls did not really seem in the right frame of mind (beans in their pants) so I secretly decided to test them to see how much they had remembered on the ladies that we had already covered.

I sent them both off to the spare room (where the dress ups box lives) and asked them to come back dressed as one of the people that we have covered and sit down on the stool that I placed in the corner of the lounge room and tell me all about themselves.

Agent Smelly came down as Dian Fossey. She has a plastic leaf in her hands which she chewed on when she sat down, like Dian did when she tried to make friends with the gorillas. Then she told me some things about herself, actually remembering where she, Dian, had lived and studied the gorillas. I was quite impressed although I did need to ask some questions to prod her along a bit but she did very well considering it's been a few months since we studied Dian.

Not hard to guess who The Fashionista decided to come as ... "The Lady with the Lamp" ... Florence Nightingale. I didn't have to ask her as many questions as she was able to tell me quite a bit about herself. I was very pleased with her efforts too. Check out the pose will you, apparently she had to sit like Florence was on the front of one of the books. Her bonnet is actually off one of her old fashioned dolls ... she certainly gets and A for the outfit!


This activity was a huge success with both girls really enjoying the dressing up and pretending that they were a famous person. They had no idea that I was checking to see what they had actually learnt and retained, which was about what I expected them to have and in some cases I was pleasantly surprised. It's funny what they find important enough to have retained about a person. A little telling at times.


I will try this again with them and they are very keen to do it again, so I had better get a move along and teach them about some more inspirational people.