American Girl Club: Meet Kaya

In case you've forgotten, at my library we have a monthly American Girl Club program for Grades 3-6. We pick a different girl each month, and spend time learning about her time period with discussion, games, crafts and snacks. The first girl we are learning about this school year is Kaya, a Nez Perce girl from 1764. As usual, our special guest was the library's Kaya doll.

I kept this program pretty simple because I knew attendance would be relatively low this month as people get into the routine of the new school year. The only money I spent was the $10 I spent on snacks.

We started out talking about Kaya and her stories. This was relatively brief because none of the attendees had read the books.

After that I wanted to make sure to get the kids moving, so we did a variety of animal themed races. These included racing as crabs, bears and frogs. I thought this was a good connection because respect for animals is an important part of Kaya's culture. I found the inspiration for these races here.

I saw on several sites that Nez Perce had a game where they would throw pinecones through a hoop. I adapted this and made a target on the ground for the kids to throw pinecones at. The pinecones were a donation from one of our clerks.

Our next game was found in American Girl's Kaya Event Kit (which is sadly no longer available on the American Girl website). It is called "Fur or Feathers". Each person pulls the name of an animal and the others must guess their animal using yes or no questions. I added a charades component to make things a little easier. Major bonus points to the girl who acted out "porcupine"!

We ended the program with a craft and snack. The craft I used was the Rosette craft in the Event Kit. For snacks we had sunflower seeds, gummy fruit snacks, goldfish and flavored water. The seeds and water were both things Kaya would have ate. The fruit snacks and goldfish were eaiser, more kid friendly versions of the same thing.

So glad to be back to doing this program! I look forward to updating you on American Girl Club throughout the year. Next month we will be learning about Caroline, an American Girl from 1812.