An unfogettable teachable moment at Girl Scouts

This week, I had combined my troops' meetings to Wednesday night only this week. I had other family obligations going on on my regular Tuesday meetings for my Daisies and Brownies.
We have 2 garden plots at the Katy Leary Community Garden on the south side of Elmira, which just started last year. So for the first time this year, our troops went over to our gardens on our meeting night and time. First order of business---weeding! Our garden beds were full of weeds so the girls went to town with pulling weeds. They grabbed trowels and loosened up the soil in the beds before planting seeds. Next thing I know, I hear an "Ewww....what is that?!" Thinking it was another plant that the girls had never encountered, I continued pulling weeds. Again, I heard a "Carleen! Carleen! Come here!" and another "Ewwww, its moving!" What we later encountered was that there were some baby moles that had made a home during our absence of the tending to the garden. At first, some of the girls first instinct was to kill it, but after talking to the girls, we left the baby mole alone. In fact, they actually watched the baby for a few minutes. It was fascinating to the girls to come across this miracle of nature. This lead to a discussion of how animals make nests for their babies, that moles are actually mammals, meaning their babies are like human babies and not hatched from an egg like birds. It also lead to a discussion of what to do if you find a baby animal, or any animal in general in the wild and even what being "in the wild" is. We discussed that this is their home so that's why they chose our garden bed to make a home. We also decided to leave a large section of that garden bed unplanted in case the moles leave the bed.
Those kind of experiences are truly teachable moments, meaning you may have not planned to talk about wild animals, but it opened up their eyes--literally--to something they may never see again. And they learned this just from being in Girl Scouts!
Lovin' the Girl Scout life!
~Carleen