Girl Scouts: Meeting Recap

Hello everyone,

That was a really fun meeting.  It was great that the weather was wonderful too.  If you're trying to piece it together from kid reports, here's the recap:

First:  Every girl who had been at last month's meeting got her "World Thinking Day" patch.  Make sure you get that from your scout!  

The theme for the meeting was "Earth Day"

We started by taking a look at a few products from the grocery store and figuring out what parts of the packaging could be recycled, and also designing new packaging that would be less wasteful--focusing on the "reduce" part of "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle."

Then we spent some time talking about water pollution and litter, and talking about how it's not just ugly looking, but kills marine life.  We also talked about the floating island of garbage in the Pacific Ocean that's as bg as the entire continental United States.  (Yikes!)

To get a feel for that size, we measured the perimeter of the US map on the playground with a rope, than moved that over next to the US to see how big the floating garbage island really is.  We were surprised by how many Wisconsins could fit into it!

Then we put on gloves and grabbed some bags and cleaned up litter around our school.  We made a log of all the garbage and litter we found, and went back inside to figure out what the most common litter around the school was, to figure out who might have caused that litter, and figure out what we can do to reduce that litter.  (Answers:  recycle more, get outside garbage cans, tell other kids to not litter.)

Finally, to "Reuse" we made wire-cage necklaces with found beach glass.  The girls really seemed to like those, and made some really good-looking jewelry!  It was also neat to see girls that thought they couldn't do it figure out that they really could!  These girls can do anything!

Then we had a snack and went home with big smiles and a drive to make the world a better place.

Happy Scouting!

Aleks