Girls' Achievement Days

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Very Low Budget or No Budget Activities

Time Capsules:  With the year 2000 here a great activity for the month of January would be making time capsules with the girls. This idea was given to me by Debbie from Nephi, UT, and she said that they were using about #10 can with plastic lids painted gold. She plans to get together with her girls and decorate them.

Whenever we have decorated just about anything, I just bring glue guns, regular glue, and all the pretty scraps of lace, buttons, ribbons, small pieces of fabric, glitter glue, stickers, etc. that I have (which is a fairly large bag.) I also bring along Victorian magazines to cut pictures out of. Nice scrapes of wrapping paper work well also for pictures. Another place to get good pictures is the internet clip art pages (I stick with Victorian pictures for young ladies as they tend to then make nicer projects and don't get as silly) I just let them go with their imaginations. It doesn't ever seem to matter what we are decorating they always have fun. Some of them will have very nice matching things while others end up with mix of things. All the same they will go away happy.

Heart Attacks:  Valentine's Day is just around the corner and it is a fact that we all like to know we are loved and that others think about us. A successful activity that I have done is to get together and make all kinds of paper hearts. They can be plain paper hearts with loving messages and scriptures or fancy decorated hearts made of glitter, doilies, etc. We choose a person to give them to and in secret put them all over their house and yard.

A couple of times we got a counselor in the bishopric to help us get into the bishop's office when he wasn't there and put them all over the office as a surprise "Thank you" and expression of love for him from the girls. We've often left heart cookies or flowers for the person too. The Primary President would be a good person to serve as well since she works very hard with little thanks for a job well done.

Hidden Worth and Hidden Uses:  There are several activities that can go with this theme.

    Luncheon: you can use a luncheon as an object lesson.  The object lesson part of the luncheon will be to have a mystery menu where you have food items then a utinsel part of the menu with such things as "Lumber Jack Special" which will be a tooth pick when it is brought out. After lunch is over and everyone has had fun with eatting strange food and with different utinsels, use this as an object lesson about the labels people put on you may have little to do with what you really are. 

Aprons:  Have the girls make their own aprons.  This will teach sewing skills and can represent the need to work to achieve all your potential and that you may be surprised at what you can accomplish.

Here is a list of famous people who turned out very different from what you might have expected when they were younger:

Problems others had and kept going anyway Michael Jordan, one of basketballs greatest players, did not make the high school basketball team in his sophomore year.  His coach said "he wasn't good enough."

  Mickey Mantle struck out 710 times.

Emily Dickenson wrote abut 1,800 poems, but only seven were published in her lifetime.

Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting was suspended twice from Brown University. Eventually he dropped out.

Julia Child could barely cook until she was 34 years old; thats when she attended her first cooking school.

Orville Wright was expelled from the sixth grade for bad behavior.

Jay Leno, comedian, had a fifth-grade teacher who said, "If Jay spent as much time studying as he does trying to be a comedian, he'd be a big star."

Charles Schulz failed algebra, Latin, English, and physics in high school and had his cartoon rejected by the yearbook staff.  He once applied for a cartoonist job at the Walt Disney studios, but was turned down.

Whoopi Goldberg is a high school dropout.  She once worked in a mortuary doing reconstruction work on hair and lips.

Robin Williams was voted "Least Likely to Succeed" in high school.

Christie Brinkley, supermodel, says she was a chubby, shy teenager.

Benjamin Franklin only went to school from age eight to age 10.

Other good examples of how people turned out in the end are: Thomas Edison, Einstein, Booker T. Washington  -- Booker T. Washington is an especially good story because he was very much a self made man.  He put himself through college and studied agriculture.  He learned that when people continually grew cotton that it took certain minerals out of the soil and that if they grew peanuts (called goober peas at the time) some of the time that the peanuts would put that same mineral back and the results would be better and bigger crops of cotton in the long run.  The problem was that there was no market for peanuts -- people saw them as worthless.  So Booker went about the task of finding value to peanuts.  As I recall he discovered over 150 uses for peanuts and created a market for them.  So this is another good object lesson the peanut once considered worthless is actually a very important product in our society today because someone decided it was worth something and to discover that worth.

Here is a quote from one of Einstein's Teachers:  You're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it? And not that many years later he's teaching college. Now I ask you: Is that the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever heard? [pauses to light cigarette.] No aptitude at all for long division, but never mind. It's him they ask to split the atom. How he talked his way into the Nobel prize is beyond me. But then, I suppose it's like the man says, It's not what you know...

- Karl Arbeiter: former teacher of Albert Einstein

Also Albert Einstein was working at the patent office when he came up with the Theory of Relativity BECAUSE he had been told by his professors that he wasn't any good at Physics and not to go on in Graduate work in that field -- so he was working trying to decide what to go into.

Another object lesson that will go along with this is Different tools needed for different things and also different seeds for different plants.  People are all different because we have different potentials to help improve the world in which we live and God can use us in many ways.  We just need to learn and discover the tools (talents) within us.

Other class that can go along with this is a class on different personality types -- Myers Briggs personality types is the best for this.  You might be able to find someone on the base that can teach a class about it because this is the one the Army and I understand the military in general teaches and uses -- it is the most thoroughly researched and respected personality tests in the Psychological field.  It is a good topic for both understanding yourself and appreciating and understanding others.  A good book for this is "Please Understand Me"  here are some internet sites about it too:

http://www.midplains.net/~hoerrs/Type/typemain.html

http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/tt/h-articl/mb-simpl.htm

http://www.davideck.com/links/k-disc.html

Another idea my daughter suggested is a class on something that is more typically "boy" labeled such as fixing things around the house with the idea of teaching them not to listen to labels others would put on them and that they need to learn their own talents and interests and discover their own potentials in many areas.

 All the Material Above is Copyrighted and is Not for Reprint Without Permission

Debra Oaks Coe (c) 2000