RBG Collar for Women’s History Month

Grade Range: 1-8

Subject Areas:  History / Social Studies, ELA, Art, and Technology 

Class time: 2 hours – 3 days (can be differentiated)

Overview: Students will engage with a variety of RBG multimedia to learn about her amazing accomplishments throughout her life and career before designing and creating their own version of her iconic necklace.

Women’s History Month Resources

• The National Women’s History Museum has an amazing website that is full of resources from lesson plans, biographies, and more.

• Have your students visit the Biography page and learn about one of the women featured on the site. You can assign students a person, or let them choose. This could act as a kicking off point to do a full report (a non-fiction writing prompt, or create a poster or google slide, etc.) on an amazing female figure, or it could be a short activity where the students have 5 minutes to learn as much as they can about their person and then give a short presentation of the ‘top 5 facts’ to the rest of the class.
• NatGeo Kids has a similar resource that is a little more assessable for younger readers: Women Heroes

• PBS Kids overview of Women’s History Month (2 minutes)

• Top 10 First for Women in History from MsMojo ( 11 minutes) (appropriate for grades 4-8)

• Women in Science video (5 minutes) (grades 1-8)

• Classroom Doodles has a great collection of WHM coloring sheets that are free and printable, you can also google image search for additional coloring pages for a specific woman in history to find more options.

• Famous Women in the Millennium Word Search

• GREAT K12 Reader worksheet on Historic Women World Leaders! Students will need access to a computer to do research on the 10 women featured to be able to match them up.

• K12 Reader Sally Ride nonfiction worksheet- read and learn

Celebrating Women in our Lives

There are so many women who have made an impact on history through their courage, discoveries and accomplishments. But which woman means the most to you in your life? Maybe a family member? Teacher? Coach? There are so many wonderful women in all of our lives!

Give students some time to create WHM cards for the important women in their lives. Encourage students to write personalized notes in the card that are grade appropriate and heartfelt, or include information about a famous woman from history they learned about.

• RBG’s intricate collars and necklaces became iconic over the 27 years she spent on the US supreme court. The collars and necklaces have been recreated countless times and resold as fashion, pins, made from beads, knitwear and more.

ACTIVITY

• Have your students talk about why they think RBG wore such expressive necklaces
• Is there a piece of clothing or an accessory that makes them feel more confident or strong?
• Have students research RBG’s collars and necklaces over time, or show them this compilation of some of her more famous looks: RBG COLLARS

Create

• Simple
  • Using a white paper plate, have students cut a circle out of the top/center as seen in the photo to the right and a slit along the top so the plate can be easily placed over the head. Have students draw their designs directly onto the plate and color with crayons, markers or paint.
• Intermediate
  • First have students sketch out their designs for a collar/necklace on scrap paper. Have students focus on symmetry as all of RBGs collars were very symmetrical and geometric.
  • Using the plate method above, students can draw their designs on the plate, or cut out small pieces of colored paper to create a mosaic/beaded looking piece. Or allow students total creativity and invite them to create their collar using any materials they’d like from strong to pasta or cut up newspapers
  • *For older students, a plate might not be large enough, in this case, cutting out circles from cardboard, card stock, or fabric will work too.
• Design using Mandalas
  • Have students create a mandala design by hand or using one of the tools below and use it as inspiration for their RBG collar
    • Structured online mandala creator: Steadtler
    • Free hand online mandala creator -mandalagaba
    • Fun Mandala Coloring online activity

• FAB
  • 3D Printing
    • Have students design their collars in Tinkecad. Be sure students focus on symmetry and overlapping to ensure the necklace would print well. I suggest that the students first create a necklace base to add shapes to so it can print with a solid flat back. Encourage students to use the Duplicate, Rotate and Align features to make their designs more precise
    • Full size necklaces may be challenging to print for time and materials purposes and some printers may not have the ability to print large items. Try having students sign their designs down to 2-3 inches in diameter and turning their designs into a keychain or magnet.
  • Vinyl Cutting / Laser Cutting
    • Simple: use your laser cutter or vinyl cutter to cut out the outline of the collar or necklace and allow students to decorate it.
    • Use your laser cutter or vinyl cutter to cut out small geometric shapes that students can arrange in patterns to create a symmetric, geometric design.
    • Design: If your students are familiar with a design software, have the design their own collar to be cut from cardboard, paper or fabric to make their own lace.

Extension Activities:

After the students design their symbol it is up to the teacher to expand on the activity the following are some ideas that would work.  Please let the MFL team know if you think of anything that should be added to this list!

ART: have students research ancient Egyptian collars and how they were created with jewels and gold.

HISTORY:  Connect these power necklaces to armor and how female warriors of the past protected themselves.

MATH: Have students create a simple fractal design to use for a collar design.

ELA:   There are countless books about RBG out there and writing exercises for students of all grades to engage with!

Please take pictures of the work you do after the MFL visit and send them to the MFL team along with any anecdotal information about who the project went.  Or, if you combine a few of the extensions and have the students present their work, please invite the MFL team