Girlville.info

Our Geek Girls had a little change of pace today; we got up close and personal with science using our amazing mini microscope! Even though it’s small, our microscope showed us some big details. We looked at all kinds of things, like our hair and nails. We even found a hidden man on the back of a dollar bill! It was super cool to see things from a new perspective. Can you guess what everyday objects we magnified?

Is it snakeskin? Leather? Nope, just a regular old leaf we found in the park!

One of our girls' knitted scarves, up close and personal.

This one is REALLY cool: it looks like straw, but it's actually hair!

This is what a computer screen looks like, with the pixels magnified.

This Saturday marked New York City’s 7th Annual Dance Parade! Thousands of people danced their way across the city, demonstrating everything from hip hop, to salsa, to traditional Bolivian dance! Of course the photography girls were there to document this great cultural event. And hey, we might’ve done a little bit of dancing too!

Today our Art Geo girls started working on creating our own typography! Lenora taught us about typography, the arranging and design of words and letter, and how different types of typography can completely change the meaning of a word. Then we created our very own alphabet! Lenora encouraged us to really go for and use our letters to reflect our personalities.

Last Saturday, May 18th, we had a great time presenting at  the “Girls in Science and Engineering Day” on the Intrepid.   We gave museum visitors information on STEM programming offered at the LESGC and about our East Village Planetarium opening this Fall!  Visitors took home our Girls Club “Seed Bombs,” made with a mixture of clay, dirt, East Coast wildflower seeds, and Girls Club elbow grease!  And kids had a great time experimenting with a digital microscope from our partners at BioBus.  Stay tuned for more information about Girls Club Science programs starting this Fall!

We had a great time at the Chelsea art galleries this Friday! First Sarah took us on a tour around the Gagosian, where we saw some incredible paintings by German artist Anselm Kiefer! We also stopped in at Eye Beam, an interactive gallery where we could touch, play, and sometimes even BE the art!

We discussed an extremely important subject in Baby Feminism today- women’s suffrage. The word “suffrage” means the right to vote and run for office. We watched scenes from “Iron Jawed Angels,” a great movie about the women’s suffrage movement and some of its leaders, Lucy Burns and Alice Paul. Did you know women couldn’t vote until 1920? This change was brought about by a group of strong, determined women protesting for their rights, and maintaining a stance of nonviolence despite being mistreated and abused by their opponents. This movie made us realize that, even though it may seem like a hassle, voting is extremely important and a right that we fought hard to win.

We’ve really been buckling down in our last few weeks of Animation, and this week we were able to knock out the finishing scenes for two of our sequences. We shot a cute scene with our clay figures that will go into our “No Cliques” rule, and we shot the final scene of the entire video. The girls also worked on decorating some paper dolls that will go in our “Contact Us” rule.

This week in Photography, we look at some more examples of video portraits produced by Rebecca Davis for the Daily News. This particular series was done as part of the 10 year anniversary retrospective of 9/11, and it features interviews and photographs by the Daily News photographers who covered 9/11 as it was happening. The series is incredibly moving, and it is particularly interesting for how it brings out the stories behind the photographs that have become so iconic of 9/11. We talked about the field of spot news photography, which requires you to really throw yourself into these sometimes scary situations as they are happening. These images circulated on the front pages of the news, and they are incredibly important documents of a crucial moment in American history. After this heavy discussion, we went out into the garden to do some photography. The girls were asked to compose their photos with objects in the foreground to create more dynamic images.

This week we had a packed class at Culinary Academy, and good thing- we had lots of food to prepare today for our hungry tutoring girls! We made pizzas, and learned how to top them with caramelized onions. We also made delicious gingersnaps. Everything turned out great, and all our tutoring girls sent their compliments to the chefs!

Today we started working on a very special project- a Girls Club zine! Fly showed us a bunch of her zines for inspiration, then we started getting to work on our own! Since portraits are a large part of her work, Fly showed us some tips for drawing realistic portraits. We practiced doing self-portraits, and “blind drawings” of each other. Once we have a cover and a title, our zine will be on its way!