Girl Scouts: The Second Round

My second Girl Scout presentation, which took place in Hooper, UT on Wednesday, was also a success.  Instead of the info fair setup, with tables for everyone to go around, I was in the "kiva" in the entryway, and there were a variety of crafts set up in the cafeteria next door.  There were 125 girls signed up to attend (!), so they were split into two groups -- one sat through my presentation while the other group made crafts, and then they switched.  I didn't get the opportunity to plop hats and tie headscarves on little heads, so I instead introduced my presentations by getting 5 volunteers to come up and be models for me.  It was a nice little ice-breaker, and it's interesting to see how age- and gender-role-conscious kids of this age are.  As soon as you tell them they're wearing a man's hat, or a married woman's scarf, or a shawl that is meant for grandmothers, they get a little uncomfortable.  So I let them out of their outfits pretty quickly.

The first presentation went well -- lots of girls, probably in the 3rd-5th grade range, with some high school aged -- I heard a few girls comparing driver's licence statuses.  They asked some questions during the presentation, and more after.  The second group was the littler ones -- 1st and 2nd graders, some with toddler siblings in tow, and being asked to sit still for 30 min. after a few hours of activities.  I streamlined my talk, trying to focus on the pictures, but half of them bailed 3/4 of the way through.  Which was just fine, I understood.

A neat activity the organizer came up with for this group involved the Cyrillic alphabet.  The leader had made a bunch of simple bookmarks from white paper and colored yarn.  She asked the girls to write their name and troop number on the front, and I would write their names in Cyrillic on the back.  Unfortunately, this activity didn't include a lecture on the two alphabets, because I kept getting little girls who came back to me and asked, "What does this say?"  One actually tried to correct me, and let me know I was using the wrong letters for her name!  So I would sound the letters out, and they could see how those letters made their name in a different alphabet.

Filling out the bookmarks was the point where I had the most interaction with the girls, which was, of course, my favorite part.  They came up and asked questions, and took a look at all the felt and velvet odds and ends I had spread out on the table.  And it gave me the opportunity to snap a picture of this little diva in a kalpak. (Which is a man's hat, by the way.  *smile*)

The sassy kalpak diva