Money Counts: Daisy Leaf

Money Counts: Daisy Leaf

Welcome to the Daisy Girl's Guide to Girl Scouting!  The main focus of this book for our first and second year girls is the Daisy Petal Patch set.  Unlike the badge work for older girls, there are not a whole heck of a lot of guidelines for the petal patch set.  

The leaf badges are a great compliment to the product sales, whether it be cookies or fall products.  We did ours with our cookies sales, but in the end, you could do this anytime it fit in your schedule.

Leaf Activity #1:  Understand different kinds of coins

The first two parts of this were very similar - I did this with my girls at the beginning of cookie season, so I grabbed our bank bag of cookie money and basically dumped it out in front of them.  We spent some time identifying the different coins and their values.  My girls were in kindergarten so they needed some help and reminding.  We also put them in order and talked a bit about which ones were worth more, and what kind of things we could buy with their change.

Leaf Activity #2: Know more about paper money

The first two parts of this were very similar - I did this with my girls at the beginning of cookie season, so I grabbed our bank bag of cookie money and basically dumped it out in front of them.  We spent some time identifying the different paper bills and their values.  My girls were in kindergarten so they needed some help and reminding.  We also put them in order and talked a bit about which ones were worth more, and what kind of things we could buy with their money.

Leaf Activity #3: Find out the cost of fun

Things you'll need:

• popsicle sticks
• general info on local attractions

This was my favorite part of this badge.  For this badge, I gave the girls a budget of $10 per person, and two event options.  One was the local zoo, and the other was a meal at a fast food restaurant and time at a large park.  My girls chose the zoo.  I had 7 girls, which meant they needed 2 chaperones.  I gave my girls 90 popsicle sticks ($90), and some paper.  On the paper, I wrote:

Admission: $6, unless they have an annual pass

Lunch: $3

Snack: $3

Souvenir: $5

Train Ride: $3

Horse Ride: $4

I gave them just a few rules.  

1.  Admission was a *must*

2. Everyone had to eat.

3. If one person got a souvenir, everyone got a souvenir.

I explained that each popsicle stick was $1 - they could spend all of the popsicle sticks they had, but not more than that.  Then I let them go to town.  This was super endearing to watch - the first thing they decided to do was basically everything on the list!  We offered some gentle guidance and suggested they take care of the admission cost first, and then see where they were at with their funds. My girls took a survey of the girls and leaders to determine who had annual passes - turns out 3 girls and one leader had passes.  After this, they tackled lunch.  They liked the idea of buying lunch at the zoo, but one enterprising little lady asked if it would be cheaper to bring PBJ sandwiches and water bottles for everyone.  We estimated that would cost about $10.  After admission and lunch were taken care of, they had $50 bucks left to play with.  This was actually much more than I had expected, so this was great.  The girls talked about a souvenir, but they deemed it far to expensive for them, and (after all) the zoo was in their home town - they could spend time there whenever they wanted.  The girl were split on train rides and horses, so they voted, and split up the chaperones.  The chaperon with the train ride would need to ride but the horse one could just watch. At this point, they had $22 left.  They decided to get snacks with their money, and specified they would get popcorn, and each person would share with their buddy.  We ended up getting 4 fictional popcorns.  

Cost of our *fictional* zoo trip:

Admission: $30

Lunch: $10

Train: $12

Horse: $16

Snack: $12

Total: $80

The girls learned a valuable lesson on how much fun costs, and how to budget for it.  They also returned $10 bucks back to the troop account - for our next fun activity.

We had a great time with this - not many things cuter than 5 and 6 year olds learning about girl scouts! Tell me how your Money Counts leaf earning went!