Our Charity for the Bizarre Bazaar

We have chosen The Girl Effect as our charity this year. Click on the link to visit their site our preview THIS video to get a quick overview.

The Friendship Garden

Tonight we planted our friendship garden. The girls all participate by bringing a plant, tools and adding their own elbow grease. I particularly like the sign and overall our lasagna garden looks marvellous. A special thanks to Doreen, Clara's Mom, for coming out to explain to us what a lasagna garden is and help us design something that we can all be proud of.

I do ask the Tweens and their families to take the time to pull a few weeds when they travel through McKellar park. Many hands make light work.

Thanks to all the parents for your participation in this project.

Date Changes

We had to change our April 17th meeting to April 24th so in order to spread things out we've adjusted all the remaining dates.

April 24 - Bizarre Bazar Planning

May 8 - Games and Treasure Hunt

May 22 - Friendship garden

June 2 - Bizarre Bazar at Dovercourt

Details for the Bizarre Bazar will come home with the girls after our next meeting.

Sorry for the confusion and changes.

Whoops!!! - Double Booked - No Meeting Tonight

Just received a call from Dovercourt. The Field house has been double booked and we will be moving our regular meeting to April 24th, next week. Apologies for the confusion.

We will be having our planning session for the Bizarre Bazar so have the girls dress for painting.

Until next week, Patti

Plans for the Spring

The spring brings it's own challenges. The girls want to get out and the nights are longer. The next three meetings will move around based on weather. The girls really want a treasure hunt and games day and we will have to move that to what ever day is the nicest. For that reason, this week we will be having Spa Evening.

The wonderful thing about being girls is that we can be strong but also soft. Spa Evening is all about enjoying being a girl. We will help each other do our nails and hair and we will even experiment with making our own scrubs and facials. We want the girls to know that it's very important to take time for ourselves, to even pamper ourselves and take care of one of our most important organs, our skin.

Starting Up in April

We will see the girls back again on April 3rd. Andrea and I are still pulling things together for April. I surveyed the girls during the February meeting and they seemed interested in a game day, art project and/or a beauty event. We will post the schedule as soon as we have things firmed up.

April Activities

We will be looking for ideas for our April meetings. Looking back at the suggestions the girls originally shared in October, we still have a few options to consider including:

- sock monkeys or maybe owls

- painting the walls of the field house

- game day (TV tag, Ninja tag, etc)

- puppet show

- spa night

- hygene

- gymnastics

- zip lining (I wish)

Looking back at the list, we have done art projects, dance classes, cooking, and our pj movie night is this week.

What would the parents like us to cover?

Movie Night

The girls will be wearing their jammies, bringing stuffies and enjoying popcorn and Chicken Run this year. In past years, the girls have requested that the films be longer so we are trying a full length video this year.

In years gone by we have shared Harvest Queens, a documentary written and directed by my co-founder Janis Hass. We have also watched Kick Like a Girl and the Dove Evolution video. Janis recently suggested Flawed by Andrea Dorfman which I plan to incorporate in April.

Skating Update

We planned for this event to be earlier this year so we wouldn't run into weather problems. That didn't quite work out. We are going to cancel our skating plans and focus on emotions this week. We will be doing some drama around emotions including some work with music and a little Yoga too.

No skates required tonight.

January 10th - We Start Up Again

Reminder to all that we have moved the schedule ahead one week this month because of the school holidays, vacation, etc.

We will see the girls on January 10th.

Hope everyone had a great holiday season!

It's Time for Some Healthy Snacks

Jen Brennen will lead us through a series of recipes and the preparation of a variety of healthy snacks. I can't let the secret out of the bag yet. We'll wait for the girls to share.

All About Me Boxes

The girls have been asked to bring pictures, magazines, photos and anything else that represents their interests and passions.

Come Prepared to Play Outside

We're playing games in the park tonight, as requested by our Tweens, and doing a few Halloween crafts, also requested by the gals.

Getting To Know Each Other

We had a great evening of games and getting to know each other this past week. We played name games, move your butt (just for the fun of it), made posters about ourselves, and the girls made some recommendations for future activities. It looks like we had a few keys activities already planned that the girls wanted on the schedule including cooking, a party, games in the park and dance.

Our older group is smaller than usual this year so we are combining the groups and moving meetings to the first and third Tuesday of Oct, Nov, Jan, Feb, April and May. The schedule is outlined on the right of this site.

It looks like we have a great group. They were enthusiastic, involved and having fun last week.

Andrea, Kayla and I are looking forward to the coming year of Tween Club activities.

Welcome to Andrea!

This year's tween club instructor is Andrea Dark, both an headgaurd and swim instructor at Dovercourt. She is a third year political science and religion student at Carleton University. Andrea has always been involved in her community, whether it has been through being class president at her highschool, to helping organize her local relay for life, completing an internship on parliament hill or facilitating English Conversation Groups at Carleton. Andrea loves being active, meeting new people and having a positive influence on others! She looks forward to meeting all of you and sharing incredible memories with you over the next few months!

Getting Ready for This Year

It's been a busy summer and we are finally getting Tween Club ready for the upcoming year. More news on our leaders and our activities coming shortly. If the girls have any ideas or thoughts on what they would like to do this year, please leave them in the comments section of this blog post.

The Tween Bake Sale

The weather was dull and grey and I have to say it was cold sitting out there for 3 hours. A hot cup of tea and regular breaks inside helped to keep us warm.

Thanks to all your baked goods and a few boxes of books from our house, we were able to raise $330 (which included a $100 donation from one family) for Harmony House.

It's unfortunate the weather wasn't on our side. I think next year we need to try the first weekend in June. We've never been very lucky with the last weekend in May. Time to switch things up next year.

Thanks again for your support and assistance. We will be in touch soon.

Bizarre Bazaar - CANCELLED - But Bake Sale On!

We have canceled the Bizarre Bazaar due to weather. We can't set up the activities in the rain which changes the plan all together. We are scaling back the event to just a bake sale and me and my daughters can take care of manning the table.

If you have done your baking, please bring it by and we will gladly sell it to the Dovercourt swim lesson gang. The proceeds of the Bake Sale will got to Harmony House, our charity of choice this year. Feel free to drive up and we will grab your sweet treats from the window of you car. We will be set up under the awning on the parking lot side.

We will be in touch with a message for the girls next week and more news on next years program. I'm so sorry that the Bizarre Bazaar did not come together this year.

February Fun

We started off the month with separate sessions on emotions and a look into the mirror. Our mirrors allowed us to look at our natural beauty.

Just this week we enjoyed a beautiful evening of skating at the McKellar Park rink. We played tag and follow the leader and enjoyed a night together on the ice.

Jen Charbonneau Joins us Jan 25th

We will have a guest speaker, Jen Charbonneau at the end of the month. Jen joined us a few years ago and we thought it was time to have her back for an encore. Jen will lead a session that will focus on the tough emotion of stress. At our first session the girls talked about the stress of school, dealing with yelling parents, getting out the door in the morning, and other day to day stresses they have experienced.

Jen will help them identify the emotion of stress, provide some words to better communicate it, look at coping mechanisms and more. She will do a craft with the girls, a relaxation visualization (she will have CD's to purchase if your girls are interested) and she even has a small gift for them.

Looking forward to the session at the end of January.

Happy, Confused, Excited and Sad

These are just a few of the emotions we felt during our individual sessions this month. The younger girls looked at different emotions and described when they felt them, how their bodies reacted during these emotions and who they confide in to deal with emotions. We played games, drew strength from each other and our individualism and the rocks that Anne gave us will help remind us of the strength we draw from both.

The older girls put their emotions into motion by putting together artistic representations of their emotions. One group used a musical approach to tell the story of feeling an array of emotions, another put on a play with a narrator and background sounds and the last wrote a song and included guitar playing from one of the girls. At the end of the session, the girls shared their emotions. Most were happy and content and a few were excited and tired.

We are but a spectrum of emotions. We are emotional beings after all.

Tween's Are Back at McKellar Park

Our first meeting was held in the McKellar Park Field House tonight. The youngers arrived looking eager but slightly apprehensive. Anne Walzak and myself lead the group tonight because we are having a bit of a problem finding a new instructor. We should have the problem resolved by the end of the month.

We played name games, picked figurines to play in the sand with and designed poster that were all about us. We then proudly put them up in the new field house and claimed our territory as the Tween Club.

On October 26th the youngers will join the olders to meet and greet, mix and mingle. It was a great start to this year. The girls asked us to add some music and singing to the plans for this year. I can see some karaoke in our future.

A New Year For Tween Club

Ladies of All Ages!

We're getting ready to start Tween Club next month. We hear from our partners at Dovercourt that our younger group is full at 12 girls and the older group has a space or two left. So, we have a gang, now it's time for us to get the ball rolling. Our tentative schedule is posted and will be reviewed by us this week.

We will be confirming locations (we're planning on the field house at McKellar Park) and the instructor (looks like we will be introducing a new instructor to the gang) and I have a new partner in programming. Lots of change this year!

Updates will be coming next week.

You paddle like a girl. Good for you!

Here in Ottawa we are blessed with a downtown whitewater course and many natural rivers close-by that are great for whitewater paddling.

We are also lucky enough to have a summer camp so that urban kids can learn how to kayak in the city.

Leanne (pictured above) is one of our Tween Club members, who has attended the Ottawa River Runners Summer Camp.

According to her dad Roger: "The children develop technique, fitness, confidence, and self-discipline and have fun too! Of course this is true for many sports but I think there is a special element of confidence-building as children conquer their initial fears of going in rapids. The specific competitive sport that our club is involved in is called "Whitewater Slalom Canoeing and Kayaking" and it is an Olympic sport."

Sounds awesome.

Spoke By Spoke

Dominique Laroque is offering a new biking program called Spoke to Spoke at Creative Wheel Centre in Vals-des-mont. Dom joined us this year for a bike orientation and lesson this year and hosted a Bike Rodeo a few years ago.

We love what Dom and Creative Wheel stand for..."The Creative Wheel Centre is founded on the belief that connecting with nature through physical, contemplative and artistic pursuits is the most potent medicine available to us all." As you can tell, her centre is about a lot more than just biking.

This year Dom is launching Spoke by Spoke. Please forward this info to girls that might be interested.