3 Cheers for Animals – and 3 cheers for surviving our kickoff meeting!
This year, I’ll be sharing some of our Daisy Girl Scout troop’s experiences with the new 5 Flowers, 4 Stories, 3 Cheers for Animals! journey. For those of you who haven’t sold a cookie in awhile, journeys seem to be the new name for badges.
Our first-graders, as we’re wrapping up our Daisy petals, are turning our attention to animal care for the rest of this year. Our challenge is that our troop meets monthly, so we’re trying to condense what can be a very unique, robust 10-session program into six or seven meetings. (The 10-session program, outlined in the Girl Scout’s leader guide, is great, but there are a lot of extra activities, snacks, etc., that aren’t required to complete the journey.)
This month’s meeting focused on the kickoff for the journey. Our group of 17 girls makes it challenging to incorporate some of the activities, such as a team mural (creating one animal element each meeting) or the team paper mache birdbath. If you have a larger troop like ours, you can do what we did, and stagger other projects in rotation. Our girls worked on a few service projects – creating shoeboxes for St. Vincent de Paul and completing a few welcome cards for each of the 18,000 anticipated hotel visitors for this year’s SuperBowl inIndianapolis – a huge initiative that many Indiana
This month’s meeting focused on the kickoff for the journey. Our group of 17 girls makes it challenging to incorporate some of the activities, such as a team mural (creating one animal element each meeting) or the team paper mache birdbath. If you have a larger troop like ours, you can do what we did, and stagger other projects in rotation. Our girls worked on a few service projects – creating shoeboxes for St. Vincent de Paul and completing a few welcome cards for each of the 18,000 anticipated hotel visitors for this year’s SuperBowl in
The girls, who are early readers, loved getting their companion books and eagerly thumbed through the colorful pages. I’m sure my daughter and I will be reading often from the selection of stories at bedtime in the coming weeks.
Our toughest challenge so far? Other than the revolving stations of activities – not in itself a bad thing – narrowing down our guest speakers. Session 2, our December meeting, is to feature a speaker on some element of animal care, and we were at no loss for ideas: veterinarians, Humane Society, even a recent high school graduate/4-H’er who helped expand her father’s cattle business into locally grown meats featured at our local farmers market. Our final decision? Ferret rescue. Quirky, yes, but I can’t wait to see the girls’ reactions!
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I don't know if you are still on this or not but I'm a new daisy leader also being challenged with once a month meetings and getting eerything in. Do you have any actual meeting plans that you would share? I'm working on it now and feeling very overwhelmed.
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i am a 2nd year daisy troop leader, so we are 1st graders too. we are starting this journey book in january. i did not buy the leaders manual for this-way too complicated (IMO). i figured we could read a chapter from the book, girls follow along in their own book and then do a small craft pertaining to what we just read. field trips or guest speaker wold be nice.
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