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I love blogging, and I love girl scouts!  I adored it as a youth growing up, and I adore it now as a leader.

HOWEVER! I want to make sure that this blog is truly addressing our needs as leaders, and offering really useful resources.

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I want to offer a safe, and anonymous place to get out all your questions and frustrations.  I want to know what you WISH you knew when you started this endeavor.  Are there resources you have since discovered that would have been great to be directed to right from the start? Were you grossly unaware of the massive amount of time and dedication leading a troop takes? Were you unprepared for your parent meeting?  Did you AMAZING membership coordinator offer you some great resources, and you'd like to see those made available for others? 

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Also - what would you like to anonymously ask other leaders. Do you need to know how that one upbeat gal manages to *always* have a sunny disposition? Do you wonder how leader Sally manages to do SO many events? Are you hitting a wall with fundraising and trying to figure out how other troops seem to be rollin in the dough? Or are you frustrated with waning numbers, and wondering why more leaders wont volunteer on a service unit or council level?

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Please share!  

Zinni: Considerate and Caring - Light Green Petal

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.  Unlike the badge work for older girls, there are not a whole heck of a lot of guidelines for the petal patches.

1.  Enjoy Zinni’s Story and talk about it

Zinni's story is in the Girl's Guide to Girl Scouting.  Zinni the Zinnia is the third petal of ten that you will learn about in this guide.  Zinni's petal is about learning what being considerate and caring means.  If you don't have the Girl's Guide to Girl Scouting, you can hear it read here by Troop #5007.

2.  Come up with ideas on how to be like Zinni

This is a fairly simple step - an open forum works well, and its a great segway from discussing the story.  Once you talk about the story, and the girls are clear on what being considerate and caring means, you can ask them to come up with ideas on how to be like Zinni.  Some leaders like to par off into groups, then come back together to talk about what they came up with, but I prefer the open forum with the little ladies. 

3.  Practice being kind and considerate.  
There are a lot of ways to fulfill this requirement.  The Card Making Fun Badge is a great way to fulfill this badge - cards are a great way to show someone how kind and considerate you are.

Another way to complete this badge requirement is to help your girl make jar of kindness.  They are simple jars that help (remind) your little ladies to be kind every day.

Supplies: 

• Mason jar for each child
• Kindness slip template (download here)
• Art supplies to decorate their kindness jars
• Scissors
• Pens

1.  Give each child a mason jar, and a kindness slip.

2.  Have the children share the art supplies, and practice being considerate and caring while they decorate their Jars of Kindness.

3.  Have each child write in 2 of their own acts of kindness, and then have them cut out their strips.

4.  Have them put their slips in the jar, and explain that they can pull out one strip a day, and practice in that specific way to be caring and consider to the world around them.

**A variation of this jar is to hand out empty, clean baby food jars, and a handful of pony beads - then encourage the girls to fill their jars, adding one pony bead every time they complete an act of kindness. 

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 Sunny the Sunflower earning went!

Card Making Fun Patch

One of the MANY great things that girl scouts do, is to complete 'fun' patches.  Fun patches are just that - fun.  They technically have no requirements, and you can purchase them through the council, or through a variety of websites - www.snappylogos.com is a go to for us.

When my girls do a fun patch, our troop implements some rules.  This isn't for everyone, but we really like this process.  We choose a patch, and then we choose 3 requirements to go with it.  One requirement must be a hands on activity, one must be education based, and the third can be whatever they wish.

The patch we are talking about in this post is the card making patch.  This one was NOT girl planned - we had a different activity for this meeting planned, but the little lady who helped plan the patch requirements for that night was sick. So this was my on-the-fly solution!

The three requirements I chose were:

- Learn about the history of greeting cards

- Design and make your own greeting card

- Give that card to someone special

We tied this patch into the caring and considerate petal, since my girls are daisy's.  

The first thing we did was talk about the history of the greeting card.  This was a fairly simple chat because my girls are daisy's, but as girls age, the depth of the topic should definitely increase.  

First, I asked the girls if they knew what a greeting card was.  They all tossed out answers - some more nonsensical that others.  It boiled down to cards being a means to tell someone something. That's not far off from how they started - greeting cards were initially expensive, elaborate gifts to send messages of good will, tracing back to the ancient Egyptians, and Chinese.  In the early 1400's, Europe got in on the greeting card game, and by the mid 1800's, the greeting card had been relegated to an inexpensive and favored standard of personal communication.  That is also the time the greeting card was integrated into America.  Until the early 1900's, the design, or art, rather than the sentiment was the focus of the card, but when today's card companies began to form and mass produce greeting cards, the sentiment became the focus.  Even today, greeting cards are a popular form of communication.

The next thing we did was to create our own greeting cards.  I supplied a box of materials - papers, stickers, embellishments, etc, and let the girls go to it.  

The last step we did was to write a caring and considerate message on the inside, and address the envelope.  The girls either mailed or hand delivered their cards to brighten someones day.

Did you do this patch? Share how it went - show me how you tweaked it!