American Girl's History Club: Julie Albright Reconstructed

Since I've been floating around Library land and different branches this past year (my home branch is under renovations, but I'm going back in about 3 weeks!) I decided to try my American Girl History Club again. This time, it was a HUGE success. This time I had about 28 girls attend (with a sign up of 35) and each girl made 3 crafts.

Craft one: Flower/Daisy crown. I cut several flowers out of pink, blue, yellow and light green cardstock and green bands to go around each girl's head. The girls then picked the colors they wanted for their crowns and glued them on.

Craft 2: CD Wall flowers

I found the idea for this craft in Cool Crafts with Old CDs by Carol Sirrine. The book called for 8 Cds, a permanent marker, glue gun/hot glue, 4-foot long ribbon, small gems and adhesive wall hooks. What I actually used was: 8 Cd's, permanent marker, long ribbon and GLUE STICKS. (I wasn't about to have 7 year olds use a glue gun and there weren't enough adults to help out, so GLUE STICKS worked very well.)

The permanent marker is used to mark where each cd goes before you glue them together. The girls LOVED making cd wallflowers and it got rid of a lot of old cd- roms, so this was a win-win proect!

Craft 3 was probably my favorite: Make Your Own Daisy Barretts.

For this project, the materials needed were: artificial daisies, medium size barrette, Ailene's Craft Clue or a hot glue gun, and glitter, I used glitter glue that I found for $1 a bottle.

I went to Michael's (our local craft store) and bought a huge daisy chain (which was on sale!), and 2 packages of medium size hair barrettes. I took each daisy off the daisy chain and plucked several leaves off as well. Then I glued a leaf and daisy to the barrette, held it until it adhered to each other and then decorated it with glitter.

I think this was the favorite craft of the program.

To incorporate the 1970's I wrote out some of the major events of the decade on poster boards and posted them in the room. I also got a map of Pennsylvania and charted the route Julie may have taken on the Freedom Wagon Trail during the Bicentennial Celebrations. (Remember Julie went to visit her cousin and rode in the Pennsylvania wagon train) I also charted the route we would take if we were going from Philadelphia to Valley Forge like Julie.

I made a cd of hits from the 1970's to play in the background of the program. It was totally groovy!