North Carolina Coastal Pines teamed up with the North Carolina Museum of History to provide Girl Scouts of all ages with the opportunity to learn their story while celebrating North Carolina’s past, present, and future. This Patch Program aims to encourage Girl Scouts to dig into their history through stories of family, community, and North Carolina as a whole through activities that are immersive, educational, and fun.
For the North Carolina Story Patch Program, girls learn about different ways that historians gather information about history, and then they must apply it to gathering their own information about their personal history, their community’s history, and North Carolina’s history. Younger Girl Scouts learn about artifacts, maps, and documents while older Girl Scouts learn that these are called primary documents, and that they help historians by allowing them to create secondary documents. Girls then become historians themselves by using both types of sources to learn new things and even create their own secondary sources.
To learn about their own history, Girl Scouts can find artifacts that can be used to tell their story, make a family tree, and ask family members to share stories. For the community stories section, girls can visit a history museum, interview a person who has lived in their community for a significant amount of time, or create a map of their community and mark five historic places. Lastly, to learn more about North Carolina history, girls can create an illustrated timeline filled with big events throughout North Carolina’s history, design an award in the name of a famous person from North Carolina, or trace their family’s story to discover how they became a North Carolinian. For each of the three parts of the program, girls must discover and connect with history by learning more about where they live and creating items like scrapbooks and exhibits to share their knowledge, just like historians.
Programs like this highlight the Mission of the Girl Scout Leadership Program, which is to build girls of courage, confidence, and character that make the world a better place. By encouraging girls to identify and explore their own place in history, it shows them that they, too, can change the world, just like the leaders of North Carolina’s past. In doing so, girls learn more about themselves and develop the confidence they need to make a difference.
Learn more about the August Patch of the Month and join the largest leadership organization for girls in the country by visiting www.nccoastalpines.org.