Camping Scavenger Hunt

As you can see, our scavenger hunt included items found in nature, in the garbage, or items that might be found in the girls' overnight bags.

Not a lot of advance prep needed.  Our leader just wrote the lists out, but if you want to do it in advance, that's great!

Experience shows...
You will need to divide the girls into teams.  They love a competition!

Second Year Daisies

You survived the first year as a Girl Scout Leader.  Now what?

You're on easy street now, right?  Wrong.  Girls are a year older and now they have invited all their friends to join so all of the sudden, your troop size doubles!  It's time to recruit more moms and survey the skills and interests of all your volunteers!

Here's a suggested plan for the 2nd year of Daisy Girl Scout life:

September -- Review petals and 1/2 completed Journey

October -- Journey Session 4 & Investiture for new Scouts, Magenta: Respect Authority

November -- Journey Session 5

December -- Journey Session 6, Needle Arts (Vacation activity)

January -- Cookie Training "cookieland" role plays, Journey Session 7 & 8
February -- Yellow: Friendly & Helpful, Thinking Day, Flat Juliette project

March -- Orange: Responsible for What I Say and Do, Thinking Day, GS Birthday

April -- Light Blue: Honest & Fair, Rose: Make the World a Better Place, Earth Day

May -- plan Flying Up Ceremony, Violet: Be a Sister to Every Girl Scout (again)

June -- Flying Up/Bridging Ceremony

Wonders of Water Journey

Learning about the water molecole is more fun when it's with marshmallows!  Our resident scientist (co-leader) helped the girls learn about H-2-O with this fun edible craft!

Advance prep/supplies:
1. mini marshmallows
2. regular marshmallows
3. toothpicks
4. paper towels or paper plates

Activity plan:
1. demonstrate the making of a water molecule.
2. handout supplies and let the girls create.
3. let them eat!

The water journey continues with a little lesson about how one drop can make a difference:

Advance prep/supplies:
1. clear plastic jug
2. food coloring

Activity plan:
1. fill jug with water
2. talk about how every Girl Scout can make a difference, in their community, in their world.  They can make a difference trying to solve a problem.  For example, keeping our environment clean and waterways clear.
3. Have each girl drop a tiny drop of food coloring into jug, one at a time.
4. Results are quick: water gets cloudy and dirty.  Lesson: how one drop can dirty the water or make a difference.
5. Take home message: what can they do to make a difference in their homes and how can they help save water?

Making Cards for CityMeals on Wheels' Elderly

sample cards from our Brownies

NYC-based Citymeals on Wheels has a program where they invite individuals and  children (through schools and volunteer organizations) to decorate cards for their meal recipients.  A decorated card will get delivered with every meal to brighten the day of a lonely elderly person.  

You can see how far-reaching these cards have been so far at:

http://www.citymeals.org/food-for-thought/student-designed-cards

Citymeals provides the template which needs to be printed or taped to cardstock. Templates usually correspond to holiday themes and need to be delivered to Citymeals on Wheels volunteer coordinator by specified dates.

Advance prep/supplies:

1. Print templates from Citymeals on Wheels
2. Copy templates onto card stock (two cards fit on each 8.5x11 sheet of cardstock)
3. Collect stickers, markers, crayons
4. If you want you can also include magazines for collages and glue sticks

sample card from http://www.citymeals.org

Activity Plan:

1. Girls can decorate cards however they want but no glitter please!
2. Keep greetings general.
3. Sign cards "A Daisy Girl Scout" or "Daisy Troop XXXX".  Avoid last names or specific locations.
4. Collect the cards and mail together to Citymeals on Wheels

Experience shows:

• Girls don't always listen to instructions and they love glitter.  Double check and make sure you leave the glitter glue home.
• Simple is better (see Halloween sample above) and allows girls to create many cards instead of just one!

Alternatives:

1. Decorate cards for Holiday season for the military through the Red Cross Holiday Mail for Heroes.  You can recycle last year's Christmas card covers and the girls can make their own cards to send to Heroes. 

Girl Scout Promise Flower Pot

A great (and easy) Daisy project to reinforce the Girl Scout Promise.

Advance prep/supplies:
1. mini clay pots
2. self-sticking foam flowers & bugs (or any kind of flower stickers, but 3 dimensional are more fun)
3. green card stock
4. GS Promise pre-printed on mailing label stickers or paper
5. fun decorative scissors
6. green pipe cleaners (chenille sticks), popsicle stick or balsa wood stick.
7. styrofoam or floral foam precut and fitted into clay pots
8. fake moss or crinkly stuffing
9. masking or duct tape
10. markers

Activity plan:
1. Pass out card stock and Promise sheet only.  Have girls affix promise to card stock and then trim edges of card stock with decorative scissors.
2. Write names on back of green sheet.
3. pass out foam flower stickers and clay pot for girls to decorate green sign and pot.
4. use masking tape or duct tape to attach pipe cleaner to back of cardstsock.
5. Help each Girl Scout push pipe cleaner into floral foam and cover with crinkly paper or moss.

Experience shows...

Girls love to decorate!  Always have extras!

Alternatives:

1. cut out petals and create a Girl Scout Daisy with a blue promise center circle on green cardstock instead of making a bunch of flowers.
2. Buy bunches of fake flowers and have girls stick them into floral foam.  

Sure, I'm a Daisy Leader - but I need to do WHAT?

You know what it's like.  You've suddenly been made the Daisy leader when you thought you were just volunteering to help at the meetings.  What do you mean you have to collect paperwork, dues and plan meetings???  Isn't there a den mother to do that? Oops, that's Boy Scouts!  Well, we do it a little differently at Girl Scouts but don't despair!  There are lots and lots of resources out there, both free (blogs like these) and at your local Girl Scout Service Center or Daisy Knapsack.  In fact, if you live in a good Council area, you don't have to plan a single meetings -- you can plan your meetings around all the great events that Council organizes. But then again, that would mean you'd need to do Troop Trip forms (hmmmm).  

So reality has set in, you've reserved meeting location and times with the school office and now you are scrambling to organize the first meeting!  Well, here is Girl Scout Maniac to help you through it all - and don't worry - your first year of meetings will be crazy and unorganized, no matter how much you plan.  We are talking about 5 year olds, remember??!!!

So here is a sample meeting plan for your first year of Daisies.  

Too many Daisies? Need Crowd Control? Try patrols.

How do you get control when you've got 20 Daisies in a room with lots of distractions?  No matter how many volunteers we had, our meetings were Fridays after school, which meant a triple whammy:  the girls are famished, wild, and they wanted to sit with their BFFs.  

Animal Patrols take 'control'

To solve our problem...

We assigned the girls randomly to "patrols" where they sat together each week.  Since we were doing the "3 Cheers for Animals" Daisy Journey, we brought 4 different stuffed animals for each patrol, put them on the table and also put a 'table tent' card listing all the girls in that patrol.  



They grumbled at first, but quickly got the hang of it and we found some peace for the rest of the year!  Each week, after Opening Ceremonies, the girls faithfully found their patrols and waited to devour their snacks.

Volunteer or Join Girl Scouts this week! #icantwaitto

Volunteer with Girl Scouts and get your girls or friends' daughters to join Girl Scouts this week.  Even if there is no troop in your area, that is OK.  You can start one OR girls can join as 'Juliettes' and just participate in Camp programs and Council-sponsored events (and there are lots and lots of them!).  Check out this video from First Lady Michelle Obama!



#icantwaitto

Panda Jar

This project was inspired from in an old issue of Ranger Rick Jr. magazine.  They have since updated the project to use foam, but I prefer using felt.  (click here for Ranger Rick version of craft)

Panda Jar for Daisy Animal Journey

Advance Prep/Supplies:

1. Collect old jam and salsa jars with lids

2. Black,white & green felt-precut strips: circle for lid (white), long strip to cover edge of lid (black), small circle (black) for nose, ovals for eyes (black), 2 ears (black), 2 arms (black), bamboo shoot (green) -- all should be pre-packaged in sandwich bags for each girl.

3. Medium or large googly eyes 

4. Glue

5. Black markers 
6. Inexpensive candy to fill jars

Activity Plan:

1. Review the world map and talk about pandas: their habitat, food and habits.

2. Read Animal Journey about Pandas and China

3. Give each girl a jar and supply bag 

4. Offer gluing directions, step-by-step.  Jar lid becomes panda head, jar is body & arms.

5. When completed, girls can wait in line to get it filled with candy.

Experience shows...

1. Choose bottles that are cylinders (not octagons or hexagons or ridged!)

2. Choose your glue carefully. Super tacky or fabric glue work best with felt but you might want to test different glues on the glass also (in advance!).

Alternatives:

1. Make elephant, lion, birds, or other animals as needed.
2. Panda masks can be downloaded and printed from Girl Scout website too.

Investiture? What's that?

Girl Scouts encourages leaders to plan Investitures for the 3rd or 4th meeting. This is when the Girl Scout is official 'vested' or pinned as a scout. I always thought the timing of the investiture was awkward because the girls want to start wearing their new uniform (tunic or vest) as soon as possible. In fact when I started in leading, we were told that uniforms were absolutely required for meetings (they are 5 yrs old-not so easy in reality!). So, if you can, save the tunics to hand out for this ceremony, but if not, then you can give them the official Girl Scout pin (trefoil) during the ceremony as well as their first badge, the blue Promise circle, for the center of the Daisy flower.

Part of the reason why Investitures are not held at the first meeting is that the girls need the time to learn the Girl Scout Promise! In my experience,

Why Girl Scout Fun?

I started to blog to help fellow Girl Scout leaders do what's important-create fun projects for the youngest scouts without spending hours coming up with the ideas.  Books are nice-they have creative stories but when you are in the trenches, you need projects and ideas which will keep 15-25 daisies quiet and captivated and hopefully motivated and inspired to stay in scouting for years to come.

I spent countless hours, as a new Daisy leader, searching for project ideas-back 6 years ago-when we didn't have Pinterest or great blogs to give us ideas. I always felt the responsibility to share ideas with the new leaders behind me but there was never an easy way.   Our Council is trying to make use of social media too, but its slow going!

This blog is not officially affiliated with Girl Scouts or any of their organizations but I respect and honor their mission.

Daisy Banners

This Daisy decided to add a heart on top of
her blue promise circle!

We love to reinforce the Daisy petal theme with our Kindergarteners.  What better way than to give them a little take home banner?  

Advance prep/supplies:
1. yarn
2. sticks broken to approximately one foot lengths
3. "Daisy blue" felt or fleece
4. pre-cut flower petals and a promise circle to correspond to official Daisy petals, preferably sticker-backed felt.  To emphasize the promise circle, you may need to cut out an additional white circle slightly large than the blue promise circle.
5. fabric glue, preferably Fabri-tek.
6. Make a sample (see note below about glues).

Activity Plan:
1. Distribute blue felt/fleece, sticks and yarn.
2. Have girls fold felt over stick and apply strip of glue.
3. Help girls tie yarn to each end of stick
4. Turn over 'banner' so foldover is hidden (unlike this sample photo!).
5. Stick or glue petals (in any order) around a blue promise circle (if needed, adhere a white circle below the blue circle, for emphasis).

Experience shows...
It's really hard to work with glue and felt.  Buy the best fabric glue that you can.  I recommend Fabri-tek.  The felt absorbs the glue.  You should experiment at home first.

Alternatives:
You can buy felt letters and symbols, with sticker backs.  If you want, you can have the girls add their initials to their banner.