The End....of summer

We had a great last day together!
We made shrink art (forgot to take a picture), danced, played in the fort, went to the park, drew with chalk, did Improv with Peyton and said our goodbyes.

Most of us will see each other roaming the halls of Deerwood but if that doesn't happen we will reunite at a pizza party in late September.

Thanks for the great summer with SuperGirls!

Side note:

Thanks to all who contributed books for Back to School Africa. 

There had to have been at least 250 books, plus the money from our lemonade stand.

Be confident

Well, another summer has flown by and we had our last structured SuperGirls day.
For our last day next week we will have a free day.

Shrinky dinks and a trip to the park have been requested.

We started out with a little circle time talking about what events the girls had coming up and any trips they may be taking before school.

It seems everyone has had a fun filled summer!

Then we headed to the tables where we spent a little extra time on our craft and created memory books.

Last year Peyton and I had put the books together
for the girls but this year I printed the photos and
let them choose which ones to include in their books
and how to decorate them.

I hope these books will end up in a memory box so they can look at them years from now.


I recently went through some of my old projects and photos from when I was their age and I am so happy that my mom kept those things for me.

After the photos were mounted and stickers and designs added, we met outside for a snack of freezy pops.

Peyton took on the task of leading the girls in our group activity based around our theme of confidence.

One of her activities includes being part of an Improv team so she talked to the girls about what it takes to get up in front of others with no script and have to think on your feet and be funny!

Personally, I would find this very challenging and out of my comfort zone but I have seen Peyton perform and she is very talented!

Most of the girls are good about trying new things and some have progressed from even the beginning of summer in being confident and saying yes to something they may not be comfortable doing.

They played two games where they had to repeat what someone says and go around in a circle.

When it comes to your turn, you need to say whatever the person before you said, exactly how they said it.

So, if they used gestures or giggled or said it in a low voice or screamed, you had to do that too.










The second game was copying someone's actions. They sang a song and clapped and when it came to a certain part in the song they had to stop and face someone and do some crazy dance moves.

Then the person in front of them had to copy exactly what they did.

Last but not least was a game where one of the girls would be a host of a party.
The others went in a different room and decided what identifiable character trait they would have.

Some included:
Being afraid of the ceiling fan
Being Taylor Swift
A person who likes to cut hair
Someone who has uncontrollable bladder
Acting like a cat
And the list goes on...

The girls would act out the things above and the party host would have to guess what it is they were doing.

There was a lot of laughing because these girls know how to be silly and they are all good at acting out crazy movements.

Everyone participated and did a great job!

Time was running out so we went outside and did some running around and tree climbing.

Week 9 done of SuperGirls 2013. It's been a lot of fun!

See you next week...

Lemonade stand

Finally...we had our lemonade and cookie stand on a beautiful, breezy morning.
In fact, it was slightly cool and we were starting pretty early so I wasn't sure how many customers we would have.

Some of the kids who will receive the books we donate.

We switched our charity from Hope for the City to Children's Cup Back to School Africa.

As many of you know, I traveled to Swaziland, Africa on a missions trip in February so this organization and the children they help are close to my heart.

Along with the money we raise, we are sending books. How neat to think that a book that's been sitting on your shelf will be read by a child in Africa!

The money will go to school fees ($150 per year per child) so the children can actually attend school.







First off, we revised a couple of our signs and we had to decorate our plain ol' cups to feature SuperGirl stickers, flowers and other designs. They turned out so cute. Again, Sharpie markers to the rescue!

We gathered on the deck for a snack while we talked about who would be performing which job.
We needed the girls to do the following:

hold the signs
put ice in the cups
pour the lemonade
pass out cookies
take money

Once the jobs were assigned we dragged everything out to the corner of our yard and set up shop.
We had a customer within five minutes!

Everyone had fun waving at cars, jumping around and hula hooping to get people's attention.

Once we had people stopping Genevieve did a great job of telling our customers about Children's Cup and where their money would be going.

Genevieve and Vivienne's little sisters helped too!

One hour later and we had $28! Anjolina and Traci had also contributed $32 from a lemonade stand they'd done on their own so that is a good amount of money to pay for school fees.

What a neat way for the SuperGirls to help out kids across the globe!

With extra cookies left, everyone had one for themselves and we packed up our things and hung out in the front yard for the last half hour of our time together.





After some chalk drawing and jump roping some of the girls headed to the basement fort to play.

I am taking book donations until August 23rd so if you have gently used or new books anywhere from preschool-teens please bring them next Friday.

The fearless leaders!

See you next week...

Park clean up

In our continuing effort to help others and do nice things in our community
we had our 2nd annual park clean up down at Blackhawk Park.

There is always a lot of trash floating around which is quite frustrating since there are trash cans right at the end of the dock!

So, it was up to the SuperGirls to clean the water and the walkways.

First we had a short play time on the playground equipment.

Then we gathered to hand out gloves and talk about why we were picking up trash.












Since I was unable to find cute gardening gloves like last year, I bought some latex gloves and went to town with some sharpie markers.

I thought they looked darn cute!

The girls were eager to help. We talked about the reasons cleaning up the park was important even if we weren't the ones who left the mess.
Comments included:

So that ducks and fish and other wildlife wouldn't be harmed. 
So, it would look beautiful.
Because we should take care of our planet.

Off to a great start!

We took a good half hour to fill a large trash bag half way with all kinds of bottles, cans, cigarette butts,

rubber bands, candy wrappers, bobber and plastic bags.

Luckily Peyton was limber enough to climb into precarious places with the big long net.

As we headed back towards the main play area I started hearing a lot of whining.

I'm hotttttttt
I'm huuuuuunngryy
I'm tiiiiiiired

So, we decided to break for a snack.

I also felt like it was time for everyone to close their eyes for a moment, take a deep breath and envision in their heads the following scene:

You're laying in a hospital room, hooked up to tubes and you have a cast on half of your body. You're really sick and can't eat or even sit up.

After they had this image in their head they could open their eyes, look around at all of their friends and feel the sun and a breeze on their faces.

Whoah! Awesome! Smiles all around!

I told them it was time to quit complaining because if they were in a hospital, like so many children were at that very moment, they would give anything to be out at a park with their friends!










It was good reminder to be grateful for our health and the fact that we were able to walk around and see all of that beauty on a sunny day.

I didn't see any eye rolling and they all seemed to buck up for the rest of our time together. We went back to the trail by the lake and walked and talked and climbed hills and pointed out dragonflies and other cool stuff we saw.

They definitely wanted to make it back to the playground for some free time so we headed back that way.
After a few minutes, we were surprised by Greta's mom who brought little ice cream cups for everyone. What a fun treat!

And, it was a nice way to wrap up our time together around the picnic table before it was time to go home.

Only three weeks left!

I know some will be gone in the next couple of Fridays so maybe we'll have a grand finale pizza party some weekend night.

I'll keep you all posted.