question about girls aged 4-8

[gabesmama]

Hi,

I am usually in the toddler forum but I thought I would pop over here to ask a question. I am the director of a family education program and I am writing a program for females. I have the females divided by age for a discussion group. I have ideas of what to discuss witht he pre-teens and adults but I am looking for ideas for the girls aged 4-8. I was thinking about positive female role models. Does anyone have any other suggestions about issues or topics of interest for this age group.

Thanks,

Lori

[bestjob]

My dd is 8.5 yo, so I can tell you about her. She is more interested in doing things than discussing things, and I was a Brownie leader for a year, and I'd say she's fairly typical. That means that if you want to discuss a particular topic, you need to lead into it with a craft, or an activity. One powerful activity that she participated in was called "The Spoon Project" (look for this on the web) and the children discussed poverty in our (apparently well to do) community while decorating wooden spoons. This age group loves to help others in tangible ways: picking up garbage at the local park, or fundraising to buy a coat for a child living in poverty. They like action, like dancing, gymnastics, or a hike. Sitting in a circle talking about things leaves them tongue-tied because they are still discovering their own worlds and their own opinions. They love food, so a cooking or food preparation activity is very popular. Once I had each girl in our Brownie unit cut up a different fruit to make a huge, scrumptious fruit salad that we all shared at the end of the meeting. Some kids this in this age group find many videos too exciting or frightening, so trying to engage children through TV or videos can be very difficult. Some children in this age group are difficult to engage in a discussion about emotions and feelings because they are still busy exploring the tangible world.

Those are a few ideas. Hope it helps you.

[carnation]

girls aged 4-8

I thought this was an intriguing question. My daughter is 7 and she and her friends love dolls, sequence books, like American Doll Books that are historical fiction. They love characters in books, like from the Lizzie McGuire books. They relate so much to the look and personality, setting, relationships and conflicts of characters. Even though we don't see movies too much, the media pushes these characters in the bookstores, etc. But, I think the Lizzie Mcguire books are fun and positive. So, books, dolls and doing crafts, they love - dollmaking and puppets. I think they are still very much into their imagination still, so to delve too much into reality based things might cause them to lose interest.
I hope this helps

[misfit]

As the mother of a 5.5 yo I would add that this is a broad age range and if you are creating a craft project for them you need to be sure the 4 and 5 year-olds can handle it and at the same time that the 7-8 year olds don't get bored. They are not all that dextrous yet and require assistance with complicated scissor and glue work. My dd gets very frustrated when she can't do things like the big kids can, a common problem for 4 and 5 years. Something where the oldest helped out the youngest would be a good solution that would also promote teamwork.

[EnviroBecca]

I recently did a program for Brownies (6-9yo) where we talked about the history of clothing fashions. First we looked at old Girl Scout uniforms, which I had hung up on the walls w/signs that said e.g. "1956--47 years ago!", and talked about how and why they are different from modern uniforms. I pointed out a few things and encouraged them to talk about their observations. (For non-Scouts, you could use regular girls' clothing--maybe get outfits from increments of 25 years and talk about what their mothers wore at their age, grandmothers, etc.) Then we all flipped thru books to find interesting examples of clothing and talked about them. One thing that came up was corsets--girls from one school had been told about the health problems caused by them; after that, I said, "We don't wear corsets anymore, but some women still wear clothes that are bad for their bodies. Can you think of some?" and somebody thought of high heels. We also got onto an interesting tangent because of a book on the '70s depicting African-American fashion: The black girls then wanted to know what black people wore in earlier decades but found that no blacks were depicted in illustrations of, say, 1920s fashion. Why? "White people used to act like black people were invisible," I said, "so nobody was paying attention to what black people were wearing then or taking a lot of photos." The girls then began to tell what they knew about how African-Americans fought to be "visible".

Anyway, it was a great activity and one that I think girls as young as 4 might find interesting. Any aspect of how life was different for little girls in the past (mom didn't have a VCR, grandma didn't have color TV, great-grandma didn't have a TV at all, great-great-grandma didn't have electricity!) is likely to intrigue them.

Re: female role models, I think it would be a good idea to start with one example, i.e. read a story about Marie Curie, and then eventually turn the discussion to "other women we admire."

[gabesmama]

Thank you for all of your help. I am working on a lesson based on the Story of the Paper Bag Princess.

Thanks Again,

Lori