Young Women in Excellence University

Last week I posted about our “New Beginning” Personal Progress University night for the young women in my ward.  You can check it out here.  We introduced our Personal Progress University in February when we held our new beginnings. We have had a wonderful year teaching and learning about the personal progress program and participating in our University.  We ended the years theme last week at our “Young Women in Excellence” with awards, personal progress displays and a graduation from our University.

During the year we held 5 specific University activities.  The young women selected personal progress values they wanted to focus on.  We held a temple activity, a movie night about the restoration, we also had an activity right before camp about personal progress 100 years ago.  The last 2 activities were about learning to love yourself more where we gave the girls a 10 day challenge.

Awards were given at our Young Women in Excellence night. These awards were determined by attendance to these activities and different challenges we kept track of all year long.

Because the year is so full and busy we chose to do 5 but you can do this anyway you like.  You can take it as far as you want keeping track of things the girls do all year long in personal progress.  The young women enjoyed how we talked about it often and it reminded them and encouraged them to do their personal progress.

My favorite thing of the night were the displays prepared by the young women.  If you have ever been in charge of a young women in excellence the displays can sometimes be the most difficult thing to get the girls involved in.  Because we had been working and talking about this all year it was such a success.

We provided these tri-folds that we purchased at Wal-mart to go along with our school theme.  We called them their “final project”.  Asking them to pick a specific value experience or project to create their board about.  It was so special to see each young women prepare their project with pictures, object and writing about the things they have accomplished during the year in personal progress.

All of the young women leaders were assigned 2-3 young women to be their girls all year to help in personal progress and to be their “school counselors”.  They each wrote a spotlight we typed up and put next to their pictures on the table.

I took pictures of each girl holding an item that represented them or the value project they did for their display and edited them.  I turned the picture black and white and then colored the item the color of the value they had picked.

I was so happy with how they all turned out.  I printed and framed each one to give the girls at the end of the night.

We ended the evening with a silly but fun graduation.  I found these graduation hats at the dollar store in the perfect color.  The evening was successful because of the young women.  They are such wonderful examples and I think they enjoyed participating in our University.

I hope this idea will be helpful to you.  Please come back and share with me pictures and how things went. There are so many possibilities with this idea.

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