Resolutions, Poetry and Power Tools

Our first week back at SOHO after winter break was an especially exciting one! Everyone was able to get in the workshop to do some woodworking. SOHO girls and mentors used power tools - a SOHO first!

 We started off Girl Talk this week with a "New Year's SOHO Resolution". After chatting in circle for a few minutes about our winter break, everyone in the group talked about what a resolution was and how it applied to what we were doing at SOHO.  Our group resolution consisted of thinking of ways to make small gestures to show your big or little SOHO sister that you cared about them.  Then the group talked about small gestures and brainstormed small gestures of love or appreciation. we came up with: saying hello, saying goodbye, giving a hug, giving a high five, nice body language, getting materials for each other, making conversation, and a lot of others!  

 

Then all the girls and women talked about why doing these things was important and what a big difference small gestures make.  Everyone then secretly wrote down how they would implement one or more of these into their time that night. In the end, it turned into a game where each big and little sister tried one of these new techniques and then asked each other at the end of the day if they could figure out what their small gesture was.

 

Just like the week before, the new Girl Talk group created their "I AM" poems.  This group was just like the last in that they all wanted to talk and read aloud their whole poem and everyone really enjoyed this project. Even some of the more shy girls shared!

 

We'll have an update on photography soon but it sounds like everyone is getting the hang of developing their own film and printing their very first photos!

After Girl Talk and photography, everyone met back up for snack and then headed downstairs into the VisArts Wood Shop. For this particular night we had a wonderful guest teacher, Ann Walsh who taught everyone a little about woodworking and helped all the girls to design and cut out their own lap desks.  She is an amazing woman who is kind, strong, and full of confidence. She's also a professional woodworker. It's wonderful to involve other awesome women from our community with SOHO. 

Ann is very much about safety so she went over all of the safety rules with the whole group: like how to look out for one another, how to use all of the equipment, and to always ask questions when you don't know how to do something. Ann explained how to go about making the wooden tops to our lap desks. It was extra exciting for everyone because this was the first time the girls had gotten to actually do the cutting and drilling of their desks in the history of the SOHO program.

For our desks each pair used a band saw to cut out the overall shape of their desk, the drill press to drill the starting holes for handles, and the jigsaw to finish the cut-out shape for the handles. The group split into two and while some were in the wood shop with Ann, Liana, Jordan and Tesni, the others were in the next room learning how to properly sand their peices and working on sanding the edges of their desks.

Some girls and big sisters were a little nervous at the beginning (some were even a little scared) because none of the girls had ever used power tools. These nervous feelings dissipated pretty quickly once each pair started to use the first tool and felt that crazy satisfaction of doing something a little dangerous. The experience was definitely empowering -- there was a lot of girl power talk that night.  Everyone was so proud of their desks and the fact that they were able to do something they had never done before!

 SOHO ended the night with a big thank you to Ann and an awesome group picture! We can't wait to finish these lap desks in our other studios in the next few weeks...