Thursday, October 23, 2014

Pumpkin STEM Project

Check out this tasty STEM way to celebrate Halloween. Dayna at Lemon Lime Adventures has a great post with many detailed photos of this activity on her blog.

We will be doing this at our end of the month meeting for sure. Candy is already bought and the toothpicks collected!

STEM Challenge from Lemon Lime Adventures

Friday, March 7, 2014

The Snowball Fight :: Brainstorming

Lets squeeze a little more fun out of the winter this season!

We are certainly longing for nice days where we can get out and run around - but in the mean time consider bringing some snow fun indoors. This year my scout troop was needing to work together to create a community service project to tackle a concern in our neighborhood. The girls had so many great ideas it was sort of tough to narrow them down. In addition sometimes the all business meetings can be a little dry especially following a full day of school.



After watching this video, we decided to give the indoor snowball fight a try.

The girls each wrote down a problem that they saw in our community. Ideas included hunger, stray animals, literacy, and bullying. After they wrote their topic at the top of the paper the girls crumpled their pieces into a snowball shape. We split the group into two sides and at the count of three we let them toss the "snowballs" for a little bit. When I called stop (or a whistle blew) the girls all froze. They were then instructed to find a "snowball" closest to them, open it up, read the topic, and then write down one thing we could do to help with the problem stated at the top. Before we bagan this exercise we explained the importance of not squashing ideas at this stage of the game. Brainstorming is just a flushing out of ideas...no idea is to small, big, goofy or unrealistic. Narrowing them down would come later. We repeated the tossing portion a number of times so that each topic had a number of ideas underneath. The girls had a great time and still recall it as one of their favorite meetings.

Summary:

Age:

This seemed best suited for the kids in grade 3 and up - although there
were younger ones involved, they just needed a little more help
understanding the idea. When all was said in down we had a clear picture
on what the girls had the greatest passion for and we moved from there
to create their project.

Supplies:
  • A sheet of white paper for each kid
  • A writing instrument for each kid

Notes:

This would be great for brainstorming ways to use fundraising monies, where to take a field-trip, a community service project, what badges the kids most want to earn and more.

Even Further:: ways to dig deeper