New Beginnings

This year for New Beginnings we wanted to give the girls lots of ideas for the Personal Progress (PP) projects because when YW in Excellence comes around we never have projects to showcase. Even though we did this for New Beginnings it would work well as just a regular activity. We did the usual stuff you do at New Beginnings then we gave them a cover sheet to a booklet that has hundreds of ideas for PP projects. I don't have a photo of the booklet but I have the file in .pdf format. That booklet is seriously what took forever in planning this activity. I searched the web for projects, compiled them, sorted by each value and then weeded out the duplicates. Time consuming but now all the work is done for you. I'd attach the file to the blog but not sure how to do that. Just leave your email if I don't have it and I'll forward it to you.

Here was the candy buffet that turned more into the junk food buffet. I've wanted to create one of these for the longest time. The girls and dads loved this. Brittany and her mom were lifesavers and set it all up for me so I could work on setting up my rooms. They were the best and I didn't have to worry about a thing.

I collected food for each color of the YW values.

I get to work with the most amazing women in young women. They were so nice when I came up with this idea and knew it would take a lot of work from every one and there wasn't a single complaint. Each leader took a value and they were in charge of decorating a room containing items that value color and displaying value projects for that value. Then as the girls rotated to each room they would get the page for their booklet that was that value color and contained the project ideas. The leader would be in that room and just explain what that value means and give ideas for some of the projects.

I had two rooms - knowledge and divine nature. Knowledge was really easy and I had tons of projects to show for that one.

Then since I couldn't be in two places at once I quickly recorded my message for divine nature and ran that on the laptop for the girls to watch when they got to that room. Divine nature was a little harder to come up with projects. I made a cute bird garland that I didn't get a good picture of.

Here was the Good Works room that Maureen did. She went all out and this is just half of her room decorated. Our church is really old and her room just worked perfect because it has those 70s yellow accordion doors in there that just matched her value perfectly.

Nan our brand new secretary had the value virtue. I was amazed with what she came up with since she just got thrown into YW and I'm sure isn't used to my craziness yet.

We also passed out sheets for the girls to fill out for a project they would work on this year. We are still working on collecting them. It had the goal broken out in steps so we can help motivate and encourage that YW during the year to work on her project and she'll have something to display in November.