Carolyn and Allyson’s Girl Scout Silver Award:

Congratulations to Girl Scouts Caroline and Allyson from Girl Scout Troop 61229 in San Jose, CA who just received the Girl Scout Silver Award for creating projects to support students at the Doris Dillon School. They began their work when they were 8th graders. The Silver Award is the highest honor that middle school Girl Scouts can earn, requiring a minimum of 50 hours of volunteer work per girl to complete. Special thanks also to Lydia Gmerek and Sokna Chhin for their guidance and help.

Here are Caroline and Allyson’s words about their work:

“Our project was helping children learn English and developing skills they could use later in life. We chose this because learning English is so important for children in low income areas, or who attend English speaking schools. Khmer is the national language of Cambodia, but college classes are taught in English.  Education is something we are passionate about. Giving girls the same chances to learn as boys is extremely important. 

We created a Girl’s Leadership Club at the Doris Dillon School in Cambodia to help girls feel more empowered in leadership roles. We created a template for the club and gave autonomy for the girls involved to choose various activities. These activities include listening to and reading children’s books in English, reading English/Khmer bilingual books, learning about science from videos and hands on science activities as well as suggested art, music, sports and other activities.

Together, we made videos of how to assemble the RAFT (Resource Area for Teachers) science hands-on activity kits that are at the Doris Dillon School but had not been translated into Khmer. We downloaded our videos onto flash drives so girls could watch them and learn how to complete the science learning activities. 

Many US children’s books, such as the Magic Treehouse series and Island of the Blue Dolphins, had been donated to the Doris Dillon School library. We downloaded audio recordings of these booksbeing read in English and put them onto flash drives so that students could practice reading and hearing spoken English. We also provided recordings in English of how to use donated learning materials, such as Goldieblox kits. 

Doris Dillon wrote many articles for Scholastic Magazine and enjoyed a close relationship with the editorial staff at Scholastic. When they heard about our library they donated almost 100 books. When Carolyn and Allyson found out about this donation, they raised funds to provide a bookcase and shelves for these books (see photo). Thank you so much Carolyn and Allyson, for your dedication, hard work, and support!