American Girl Club: Meet Molly

This month's American Girl Club focused on Molly, an American Girl character from 1944. Like Felicity, she is one of the first American Girls, and therefore will always be a favorite of mine. She is also easy to plan for, especially if you search for activities that are related to celebration of the USA's Fourth of July.

The program started out with our usual discussion of the time period and Molly's books. Participation was even better than usual, because the kids seemed pretty familiar with the events of World War II. In particular, we talked about the hardships Molly and her family faced and how each family was required to do their part to help the war effort.

For our active game we played "Prisoner's Base", a game I found in the always helpful "American Girl Party Book". It is a version of tag that involves putting players from the opposite team in your team's "prison" and rescuing your own teams players from the other team's "prison".

Next we had a little contest to see who could make the most words out of Molly's full name: Molly Jean McIntire. This is always a fun little activity that can be adapted for use with any word/theme. The "winner's" treat was getting first pick of the free books I gave out from our stash of extras.

We ended with a craft and snack as usual. The craft was making flowers our of plastic bags. All you need to do this craft is about 4 plastic bag per child and some pipe cleaners. It did take a little assistance for the younger kids in the group, but most were able to do it pretty independently. Here are the instructions I gave each child.

As our snack we had star shaped jelly sandwiches, carrots (because Americans many grew "victory gardens" during World War II), M & Ms (invented during Molly's childhood), and juice. I was very impressed with the child who pointed out the M & M could stand for Molly McIntire because I hadn't even thought of that when I purchased them!

For information on my other American Girl related programs go to these posts:

• Grace, 2015 Girl of the Year
• Samantha, from 1904
• Caroline, from 1812
• Kaya, from 1764
• Addy, from 1864
• Josefina, from 1824
• Isabelle, 2014 Girl of the Year
• Best Friends
• Summer Fun 
• Felicity, from 1774

If you ever have any questions about this or any programs I'd love to answer them! Feel free to comment here, reach me on Twitter (@MsKellyTweets), or email me at marrak at libcoop.net.