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Jaime and her mother Maureen, from Tompkins Square Middle School, prepare a special banner for their Walk-a-Thon team!

Finally, she’s finished! Andrea and our excellent team of junior puppeteers put the final touches on our giant Mother Earth puppet yesterday. She looks fantastic! Our girls helped every step of the way, from planning the design to attaching her clothes. They were so proud of their creation, they didn’t want to stop working on her! We can’t wait to show her off in our 2012 Walk-a-thon for Girls’ and Women’s Health on Saturday, May 12th. Thanks so much Andrea and Alma for leading our team!

Baby Feminism performed their plays about bullying with power and poise today.  In each play, a bully learns some kind of lesson from the person she/he bullied.  After each play, we talked about the themes of the play and each play’s high and low points.  Writing and performing plays is a great way to have meaningful conversations about tough and confusing topics like bullying.  Baby Feminism is all about learning to treat ourselves and others equally, and the class could not have been more relevant to this theme.  Thanks to all for such excellent conversation and performances!

Playworks is on creative writing fire!  We played theater games; talked about the theme, plot, and setting of our play (think high school drama meets crime drama – whoa!), and we created our characters from our most amazing imaginations.  We have twin sister cheerleading captains, we have a human-right-activist-punk-rocker, and we have a British exchange student who just wants to be liked.  Sounds like high school to us!

We are excited to keep sharing the wonderful stuff that comes out of our brains and leaks on to paper!

Today in Baby Green, we learned more about the wonders of water! We started by discussing how 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water-that’s 326 million trillion gallons! We also talked about the word “conservation,” and what it means. Then we started making a poster to demonstrate the importance of conserving water. We drew 100 circles to represent all of the water on Earth. Of those circles, we made 97 blue to represent saltwater, 2 green to represent frozen water, and just 1 lonely purple circle. That one circle represents freshwater- all of the water we use for drinking, bathing, and for meeting all of our daily needs. That’s one of the reasons why it is so important to conserve water. We’re still working on it (100 circles is a lot to color in, after all!) but it’s looking great!

Today we had a visit from Alma S., a professional media manipulator. She uses her expertise in photoshop to make photos of models and landscapes “better”. She showed us some examples of photoshop in media… everything! After a few hints and tips, we were recognizing changes in every picture we looked at.

We then chose either our favorite or least favorite features. Alma showed us how even the most beautiful are photoshoped. Our skin was lightened, or lips were rouged, even our dimples were cloned out! No matter how perfect we found our features, most magazines will find something to “fix”. We don’t think this is right, the people we look up to, should look like people we can look up to.

Grace Lee Boggs spoke at a Cooper Union about her lifetime and enduring struggle for social justice. At 97 she is still going strong as activist. She inspired us to teach the younger generation on how evolution is interrelated to revolution. Her motivation comes from her basic belief that we must change ourselves in order to change the world. As a self-proclaimed feminist, pacifist, and humanist, I strongly identify with her moral drive, dedication, and devotion. For decades she has fought for integration, racial and gender equality. I love and admire that she breaks the boundaries as an Asian-American and continues with her involvement. She stated that she wants to break the stereotype of Asian women as passive and soft-spoken. I really respect that she is so passionate about what she does that she takes strangers into her home in Detroit to educate and inspire. Within her home she encourages people to engage in stimulating conversations about ranging topics affecting their community, our nation, and the world. I appreciate also that at the end of all these discussions she leaves everyone with a book. Her enthusiasm and provocativeness really makes the difference and it was such an honor to hear her speak about her decades of experience and her life journey.

By Nova Bajamonti

Today in Baby Fem, the girls continued writing plays about bullying.  Each group is challenged to write a play where a bully is convinced to stop bullying by the very people she/he bullied in the first place.  The challenge has really encouraged the girls’ creative energy!

While we cannot always convince a bully that he/she is wrong in real life, playwriting is a great space to imagine and rehearse constructive responses to bullying.

Today we started our teenage What is Beauty? program. Not only will we be discussing what we consider beautiful, but also how often times it is not the same as what media and society is trying to convince us is beauty. How does healthy affect beauty? How is beauty measured in other parts of the world?

As part of our class we will be having a blog conversation with our sister club, Club Balam in San Cristobal, Mexico. As we discuss our ideas on beauty and health, we will be uploading pictures and projects to share. Today we took photos of ourselves so our pen pals can see who we are. And, to show how teenagers do it here in NY, we used the Photobooth app. I wonder what they will upload in return.

Check out our first blog:

http://www.girlsclubworldwide.org/2012/05/introducing-what-is-beauty-2012/

Playworks started with a creative bang today.  In the class, tween girls learn how to create and perform their own group work of theater.  We played theater games, we talked about the fundamentals of what makes a play, and we learned the basics of improv as one way to create a group play.  The girls brought so much energy and enthusiasm, and we can’t wait to start writing.