Enrichment Project at a Glance

As a volunteer working with kids (or even an active parent), you start out with the knowledge and experience you possess at the time you start engaging the kids. You start with

• Life experience
• Education
• Interests
• Job skills

Organizations, such as the Girl Scouts, provides you with additional information about themselves, their programming and working with the girls. Some offer you more training and some less.

At this point, you can choose to follow the guidelines given or you can expand your program. One of the things I love about Girl Scout badges is the ability to either use what’s provided or create your own based on the other requirements. For example, in the spring I liked to do the Dancercize Try-It. The steps in the book are:

• Move to the Beat — different movements such as marching to a beat
• Dance on Stage — watch a performance
• My Own Dance — make up a dance / teach it to others
• Dance Party — have a dance party
• Follow the Leader — take turns being the movement leader
• A Dance Story — use dance to tell a story

I would host a dance party for one meeting. I’d tell the girls the week before so they knew to wear comfortable clothing.

So, for our required elements, we would:

• Have the dance party
• Learn specific dances they might do at a wedding or party
• Girls who knew the dances would lead those who didn’t know
• Let the girls make up some dance steps and share those

As you can see, the elements for dancing as exercise still happened, but instead of it being individual steps, the steps were tweaked into a theme that was more “fun” for the girls and flowed better into a single meeting / event.

The Enrichment Project builds on all the things I did with my own girls. From crafts that will probably never be in a badge program to holiday ideas and even resources you can use freely, I’m sharing my knowledge and experience so you can keep your kids engaged.

You can use the steps from the Enrichment Project badge programs with your own kids, neighborhood groups, after school clubs, organized youth groups or however you like. You can also use them for yourself to learn new things if you want to try something new but don’t know where to start.

I invite you to try a badge program today. Start on larajla.com or hop over to the Enrichment Project on Facebook to ask any questions you have.