WOW-day in your school

How to make WOW-day into something more than fund raising

When you get the yearly WOW-day brochure, you get an opportunity to learn something new about the world today, perhaps even something that your regular subjects never usually teach you.

In some schools in Norway they make WOW-day into an international project.
Here is a way to do this:

First of all you, the pupils, and the teachers together (in many schools this is the upper classes, but younger classes can also participate and make it a little simpler), must decide on which project you will work for.
We have had projects in India, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Chechnya and South-Africa over the last years, and we will continue to follow these projects for some years.

Let us say that you choose two projects, the one in Colombia and the one in Sierra Leone.

You decide on which day the fund raising will take place, say Thursday 25th October.
Then you can prepare this day with some “international days” beforehand, in this case it is reasonable to take the three days before: Monday to Wednesday.

Then you should have a committee to arrange the days. The classes choose two from each class or people volunteer. The committee must also have one representative from the teachers.

Now comes the big task: how can we put together these days so that we can learn as much as possible about the country and the project we will work for? Is there anyone in the school from these countries? Anyone among the parents? Anyone in the neighbourhood? Anyone among the pupils who want to give a lecture on the country?

You can start the first day with a lecture about Colombia and the project. What are the problems in this country? Why is it important to support projects like ours in Colombia?
You can make this the Colombian day. There will be Colombian food which will be sold for the project, there will be music and dances, a film etc. (we have a DVD about the project that you can get from us)
And in the end of the day the pupils are divided into groups where they work with some artistic activity: painting, dancing, singing, writing, modelling etc. All the groups have a leader (often one teacher or an expert the committee has found), and they work on a theme from the projects: war and peace, poverty etc.

The next day is the next project, and you should try and make a day about Sierra Leone. We have the film “Blood Diamonds” that could be shown to understand the situation in Sierra Leone. This day is very different in atmosphere, but the artistic groups continue their work at the end of the day. They may have chosen to do African dances both days or paint a Colombian picture or write poetry about peace etc.

The third day can have some appeals from the pupils. How to do the fund raising? The need to make posters etc. Or there is one lecturer more, one more film. And the artistic groups have to finish their work.
By the end of the day all the artistic participants show to others what they have done. Or you make a cultural evening that evening where the artistic groups show their dances, their small performances, sell their collection of poetry, make food for the invited guest (parents, friends, teachers), and you end up with a warm appeal to go out and do good work next day for the projects.

It is very important that the pupils do this organisation themselves with a little help from the teachers. They can choose who should have the responsibility for the introduction, remind the others about the program, hang up programs everywhere so that everybody knows what is coming next etc.

Then they go out working for one day, and then comes the collecting of the money.
Everybody must have a form where it says how much is their minimum wage for that day and get a signature from the place they have been working. One person from each class collects the money crossing out the pupils as they bring in their contribution, and one teacher takes the responsibility to collect and control everything in the end.
The money is given to the office of the school and instructed to send them to the address in the brochure.
Read the brochure carefully so that you know all the details about sending money.
Don't forget to write the address of your school so that we know who has sent the money.

If you want to do the Chechnya project a good film is the Finnish film “Three Rooms of Melancholia” which is now for sale from April 2007. There is also one TV-program from German TV about this project, which you can get from us.
If you find any other good films, articles, books that can be used, please tell us, so that we can make a list here for everybody to use.

Have a good WOW-day and international days in your schools!