November 19, 2004

GIRL SCOUT NEWS

Girl Scouts celebrate Grandparent’s Day at Villaggio Senior Apartments

Senior Girl Scout Troop 1115 and the Monterey Road Wal-Mart store sponsored “A Grandparent’s Day” celebration at Villaggio Senior Apartments, 2855 Villages Pkwy., in Evergreen on Sept. 11. Each year, Wal-Mart makes a contribution to Girl Scout Troop 1115 to honor grandparents in a deserving community organization or group.

The celebration “kicked off” with a silent prayer in recognition of 9/11, followed by introductions and remarks by Wal-Mart representatives Al Wheeler, assistant store manager and Edna DeJesus, personnel manager. The Girl Scouts played a “Name Game” with the seniors, and everyone participating in the “Name Game” won a prize.

In addition, Villaggio seniors received a dining room table and chairs for their community room and a storage chest containing all-occasion cards, items for which they were very grateful.

Girl Scouts Melanie Perry, Dana Pham and brother Brandon Pham, Bianna Trinh and Lynn Turner enjoyed performing the “Lobster Tail” and “Wal-Mart” skit. They played Bingo with the group and served refreshments too.

Violet Williams, resident of Villaggio Senior Apartments, contributed to this article.

Girl Scouts exposed to science disciplines

America’s first woman astronaut tells girls that education opens doors

By Brenda Franca-Serpa
Special to the Times

Three members of first year Junior Girl Scout Troop 810 recently attended the Sally Ride Science Festival at Stanford University to learn about various science disciplines. Women who had mastered various fields of interest in the sciences: math, biology, physics, genetics, electrical engineering, oceanography, etc. staffed the booths.

Representatives from NASA allowed interested girls to operate the prototype Mars Rover via a laptop computer. Staff engineers and scientists from Intel and IBM were also on hand. Following lunch, everyone filed into Stanford Memorial Church, the university’s architectural crown jewel, to hear the keynote address by America’s first woman astronaut Sally Ride.

Sally told the attendees that she had a very normal childhood. As a child and teen, her passion was tennis. Her parents were very average people and had no background in science at all. In fact, her parents did not like math or the sciences! So, Sally was on her own when it came time to do homework.

Sally’s talent at tennis won her a scholarship to an all girls school in the tenth grade. She excelled in math and science, particularly in physics. She took a quick break after high school to try and become a pro tennis player and quickly realized she was not good enough and went back to school.

Her talent for math and physics prevailed and she applied and was accepted into Stanford University, where she earned bachelor of arts and master’s degrees by the time she was 27 years old. She later earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

Sally became an astronaut by answering an ad NASA placed in the Stanford University newspaper. Out of nearly 8,000 candidates, Sally and 29 others were picked for astronaut training, and the rest is history. The keynote was enjoyable for the girls, and Sally Ride made them understand, through the question-and-answer session, that education opens the doors to amazing adventures and an amazing life.

After the keynote, the Girl Scouts attended two workshops they had previously chosen, with topics as diverse as extracting DNA from strawberries to a Circuits 101 workshop, where they learned about wires, batteries, bulbs and switches while learning to decode schematics and build simple circuits.

Finally, each girl purchased a book written by Sally Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessy, “The Third Planet, Exploring the Earth from Space,” and got their books autographed by Ride. The Sally Ride Science Festivals are offered yearly. For more information, go to the Web at http://www.sallyridefestivals.com.

Girl Scout Troop 162 finishes Bronze Award project: ‘Helping Out In My Community’

By Clara Chin
Special to the Times

Junior Girl Scout Troop 162 recently completed service, leadership and badge requirements before starting the highest leadership award as a Junior Girl Scout, the Bronze Award.

The project entailed choosing and leading arts and craft projects at “A Day in the Park.” The troop chose crafts such as making tissue paper ghosts, Mylar wands, cootie catchers, glitter paint brown bags, paper envelopes with note cards, button whirlies, Halloween hand-rolled paper bead necklaces and potpourri bags. The girls also helped prepare paper-wrapped chicken for the Chinese Confucius Church’s annual luncheon in Salinas.

The girls felt their biggest accomplishment at “A Day at the Park” was that they provided a wide assortment of arts and crafts at their booth and, that they all worked together as a team to help each other. They enjoyed seeing elementary to high school students come to the booth to participate in the activities. Many adults also came by to participate too.

The most valuable learning experience from this project was that each of the girls had the opportunity to choose and prepare an arts and craft activity and then teach it to the public. They got to meet and work with their multicultural community.

The girls enjoyed folding paper wrap chicken at the Chinese Confucius Church and enjoyed the honor of being named the “fastest folding group.”