City Slickers 2017: Look to the Sky!

In the midst of all of the membership dues discussion over the summer, our service unit held its annual summer camp in July called City Slickers.   To piggyback on all of the talk about the August solar eclipse, we decided on a space theme and named it “Look to the Sky!”  This is the 11th year of City Slickers, and it was originally created to give girls who have never been away to camp a way to experience one while staying relatively close to home and in town – hence the name “City Slicker.”  C/S/As start their week on either a Sunday night or Monday morning and stay overnight through Saturday morning.   Juniors stay overnight from Wednesday to Saturday morning.  Brownies attend Wednesday through Friday from 8 to 5 with a sleepover on Friday night through Saturday morning.  Daisies attend Wednesday through Friday from 10am to 2pm and also round out the week with Saturday morning activities. 

This was my third year of leading Juniors, and my new co-leader and I got to work starting in January to get our camp schedule planned!

We always try to incorporate some kind of retired Junior badge into the camp, because we would like for them to earn badges and patches that they wouldn’t necessarily do with their own troop.  The retired badge Making It Matter was a perfect fit for this camp’s theme.  We made galaxy slime to learn about polymers, used a Makey Makey and bananas (and whatever else we could find!) to experiment with circuits, and visited the local General Electric facility to learn about machines and robots from concept design to creation to the implementation phase.  One of the more popular activities we did involved making bottle rockets and then launching them later that day!

We didn’t do just experiments and STEM activities.  We also created galaxy hats using sharpies and rubbing alcohol.  Although very few of the girls actually followed the directions to make it look like a galaxy, they still had neat designs.  We always ended the night with a movie, two of which included the Girl Scout feel good movie Smart Cookies (complete with the OFFICIAL scarf counting game) and the ever popular The Emperor’s New Groove.

Lately with all of the robotics, computer science, and engineering badges and Journeys that have been released, it’s obvious that Girl Scouts’ current focus and emphasis is STEM, and that may be the case for a while.  GSUSA has come under some fire from current volunteers for the lack of variety in new programming.  I was a little curious to see how the girls at this age would respond, because if you read any of the Facebook GS groups, you’ll see a lot of comments from volunteers stating how bored their girls are getting with STEM being pushed so heavily and how it seems like schoolwork.  My co-leader and I did our best to try to mix things up and make it fun.  In fact, I would say the girls enjoyed the STEM experiments like the bottle rockets and playing with the Makey Makey more than they did the art projects like the galaxy hat and painting!

One of my favorite moments of this year’s camp was definitely unexpected (aren’t they always?).  For the first night, we watched the movie Hidden Figures.  If you haven’t seen this movie about the talents and contributions of three African-American women to NASA, watch it TONIGHT!  The girls loved the message of the movie and stayed interested during the entire movie.  The next day, we took a day trip to PARI, a former NASA facility located in Rosman, NC.  I’ll be honest – this was the second day of camp, and some of the girls were bored during the trip and the planetarium visit.  Some it had to do with the dynamics of the group, but I think a good bit of it was due to staying up too late the first night.  PARI didn’t have as much to offer as I thought they would, but what made the trip worthwhile was what we found at the very end of the museum tour.  I hadn’t quite caught up to the whole group yet, but one of the girls came over to me and said, “Look Mrs. Amy!  It’s one of the rockets from last night’s movie!”  Sure enough, a Redstone rocket engine featured in Hidden Figures was on display.  The girls got a big kick out of it, and it really made things “real” to them.

All in all, I think activity-wise, this was one of the more interesting City Slickers camp I’ve been a part of.  This was my first year with a new co-leader, and we really hit it off and planning came very easy to us.  Now the group of girls we had this year presented some unique challenges, so that was a different story.  But we did the best we could, and we received good feedback.

This upcoming year’s theme will have a vintage theme, so we’re going back to the basics of Girl Scouting!   Planning starts here pretty soon and before you know it, it’ll be summer again and we’ll be kicking off another installment of City Slickers!