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

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. 

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.

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.