Junior Build Your Way to the Bronze Award Activity
Build your community and identify ways to help make a change.
Get inspiration for your Bronze Award project from a LEGO® Designer.
Watch Brickmaster Amy (LEGO® Designer and Judge on LEGO® Masters USA) as she gives us inspiration on how to create builds with LEGO® bricks to represent different communities to help through Bronze Award projects. In this activity, you will use creativity and play to unlock your imagination and build models of communities that represent ideas for how you can help rebuild the world through your Bronze Award. Build, unbuild, and rebuild with your LEGO® bricks for inspiration.
Activity Details
Time needed: 55 – 65 minutes
Materials needed:
- LEGO® bricks
- DIY materials – cardboard, markers, tape, scissors, cotton swabs
- Observation List worksheet found on page 5 of Bronze Award Guidelines
Setup:
The Bronze Award is the highest award a Girl Scout Junior can earn. To earn it, you work as a team. The team identifies a community issue they care about, research what causes the issue, come up with a solution, and work with the community to make a plan that brings the solution to life. Juniors will learn important leadership skills, discover new passions, and watch how seemingly small actions can make a BIG difference. In this activity we are going to be learning through play! Through creativity, unlock your imagination and begin taking steps to rebuild the world. You will use LEGO® bricks or other DIY materials to identify different communities you’re a part of and brainstorm ways you can make a positive change.
Activity:
- Consider what people, places or groups make up your community. Take a close look around you and consider the places or people you have you seen in the past week. Fill out the first column of the Observation List worksheet with communities you care about and where you might want to take action.
- Watch the short video provided of Brickmaster Amy (LEGO® Designer and Judge on LEGO® Masters USA) to get inspiration about how to build representations of your communities.
- Build with LEGO® bricks or other DIY materials a visual of one or more communities on your Observation List where you might want to take action during your Bronze Award. There is no right or wrong way to build – that’s what makes playing with LEGO® bricks so fun and creative – you can build (stack bricks together), unbuild (take bricks apart), and rebuild (restack bricks into something else). What does your build represent? How did you pick your community that you built? Have you ever done anything with that community before? If you have other communities you are interested in helping, build those too.
- Fill out the second column of the Observation List worksheet with ideas for how to help the communities you have listed. Decide what you care about, what bothers you, who you would like to help and what you would like to improve in your community if you could.
- Build, unbuild and rebuild with LEGO® bricks or other DIY materials again to brainstorm project ideas. Review your possible project ideas column on the Observation List worksheet and circle the three ideas that matter the most to you then build! Rebuild, improve and make them bigger and better. Make it fun! What do your builds represent? How did you go from the list with many ideas to choosing three? How do these ideas help a community from your first build? Are they the most fun? Or are they the ones we think we can actually accomplish or do they make the biggest difference?
- Continue to explore your community and become excited to make a change!
Next Steps include sharing your ideas with your Bronze Award team or if you don’t have a team yet, then it’s time to build one! Have the team gather more information to really understand the problems and choose the one that you can do best to make a difference.
