Santa Monica Girl Scout Troop 5515 earns Silver Award by sponsoring Love of Literacy Event

April 5, 2009 - PRLog -- Cadette Troop 5515 of Santa Monica, California, recently completed all of their requirements to earn their silver award, which is the second highest achievement that a girl scout can earn. Starting in 2007, with a dream to spread their passion for reading,the scouts created a Love of Literacy program.

The scouts did a lot of  research on illiteracy and discovered that there is a direct correlation between successful readers and the number of books available to them in a school or classroom library. So academic achievement is affected by the amount of books available to a child.

Troop 5515 decided to help with this problem and collected and donated over 2,000 books to Oak Street Elementary and Daniel Freeman Elementary schools in Inglewood.  At each school, the girls hosted more than sixty students in a special 'Love of Literacy" event that included reading stories, creating mad-libs, making bookmarks, and giving each child the chance to pick out a book for their own home library. In preparation for both events, the scouts held book drives in their neighborhoods, built bookcases, learned reading skills and became certified as "Junior BookPALs,the first group in the Screen Actor Guild's Los
Angeles  history". They also designed and silk screened book bags for literacy kits.

The Girl Scouts’ mission was to spread literacy awareness and provide children an opportunity to learn and love reading like they do. The girls loved seeing all the children's smiling faces in the classroom and felt very happy when the event was over .

The feedback from the kids and teachers was great. The kids asked their teachers when the Girl Scouts would be coming back. They also told their teachers they loved the books and bags. Many of the kids now use the book bags as their back packs to school.  They also brought their books to school with them to read.

The teachers of the schools enjoyed having the Girl Scouts because they felt as though the girls spread a positive message and inspired their students to read. Troop 5515 got really good feedback and the girl scouts plan to expand on their literacy theme and hold more events as they begin their work for their gold awards.

The girls influenced many kids to love to read. They were very successful and were glad that they had made a difference in many peoples lives.

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Troop 5515 is a Cadette Girl Scout Troop based in Santa Monica California that has been together for eight years and has just earned their silver award.