Easy bird feeder "cookies"

Our Daisy Girl Scout troop has been working on the 5 Flowers, 4 Stories, 3 Cheers for Animals patch series this year, and the other leaders and I are always on the lookout for creative ways for the girls to express them selves, while staying frugal and not creating a lot of excess for parents to store!


The robin is one of the animals we've talked about this year. Most of our work around this has centered around the suggested activity of building a "bird nest" and papier mache bird, which the girls have loved. But finding something that translates into taking action, especially in the dead of winter, is challenging.


I found this activity on education.com. Technically it's for "Christmas Cookies" for the birds - but you could easily make it using any shape or cookie cutter - or even cut circles with the lip of a cup. We beta-tested it at home with a first-grader and preschooler, and the project took less than 15 minutes with clean-up. (Plan accordingly with the size of your group!)

Supplies needed are bread (they recommend slightly stale, and I agree - ours was too soft to hang), peanut butter or shortening, birdseed, sunflower seeds and/or raisins, cups or cookie cutters, straws (1 per three girls), knives to spread peanut butter with (1 per 2-3 girls) and yarn or twist-ties from garbage bags.

Simply put, you cut out bread into shapes, poke a hole in it with the straw, slather it with peanut butter and cover with birdseed. (We used raisins and sunflower seeds.) Setting these up on cookie sheets made for easy clean up!

To finish it, we used trash bag ties (which had been in my drawer for years) pulled through the hole. We're letting it dry before we attempt to hang it outdoors, so you may want to consider sending the projects home on scrap pieces of cardboard so projects don't break en route.

Messy, but fun!

Looking for more Girl Scout ideas? Visit my new scout leader resource site, Use Resources Wisely. 

Ferret fun

Seventeen Daisy Girl Scouts and three ferrets. You'd think it would be the recipe for trouble.

But our first-grade Scout troop couldn't get enough of these furry little creatures at our monthly meeting last night.

As part of our journey (patch series) this year, we invited two speakers from the Ferret Rescue and Halfway House in Martinsville to share about how they care for ferrets abandoned by their owners. The group, located southwest of Indianapolis, rescues as many as 400 ferrets each year.

Personality wise, ferrets seem to have a lot in common with my 3 year old son: energetic, can't sit still, don't want to be held for long, but sometimes relishing a quiet place to hide from the crowd.

The girls were captivated by the three ferrets crawling about the room, but they absorbed many fun facts about the ferrets and their care in the process. They loved learning about how the ferret was trained to do tricks for Harry Potter, seeing how their small bodies can stretch and bend, learning how they ate bugs and other facts. I'm sure it will be on one of those meetings they will be talking about for a while -- and I apologize to any parents whose kids suddenly ask Santa for a ferret!!

This is part of a recurring series sharing ideas from the Daisy Girl Scout patch series 5 Flowers, 4 Stories, 3 Cheers for Animals! journey. You can read the previous installment here.

3 Cheers! Daisy Scout Journey - Our Adventure

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 in Indianapolis – a huge initiative that many Indiana schools and troops are participating 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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