girl scouts of the colonial coast
Emma, a Girl Scout Ambassador from Virginia Beach, has earned the Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest honor and achievement a girl can earn in Girl Scouting.Music has always been an important part of Emma’s life. Knowing that exposure to music can have a positive effect on brain development, Emma focused her Gold Award project on teaching children the foundation of music theory and giving them the experience of performing in a choir.
Emma created two choirs at Virginia Beach Community Chapel—a children’s choir and a youth praise team. After developing curricula, she held weekly meetings of the groups, during which she taught the children about rhythm and tempo of different songs. She worked with the older children to teach them how to read time signatures and sheet music. Under Emma’s direction, the children’s choir and youth praise team performed multiple times for holidays and special occasions at the church.
“Music education in school is limited, and outside of that there are not many options for children looking to get involved in music,” Emma said. “My project made it easy for kids to work music into their lives.”
Emma also created a curriculum for beginning choirs and placed it on a website that she created so it can be shared with others to use.
The Gold Award requires girls to identify an issue in their community and carry out a Take Action project to address the matter through leadership work. Nationwide, less than 6 percent of eligible Girl Scouts earn the Gold Award, which adds Emma to an elite group of female leaders across the country with the honor.
