Our Girl Scout Journey

Natalie has been a Girl Scout Daisy all year and has had a great time with it.  I offered to help the troop leader and take over the last 4 meetings of the year, leading the girls through a Girl Scout "Journey" where they could earn a special patch for their cute little blue vests.  On this journey, they learned all about the Girl Scout Law and did lessons to remind them what each petal they earned throughout the year stood for.  These meetings were after school (which is also Audrey's nap time) so I held them at my house.  The fellow Daisy parents were AWESOME about getting their girls over here and picking them up.  It was not the most convenient for them but hosting the girls at our house enabled us to do a lot of fun projects (like planting their own flower gardens!) that would have been tricky to do at school.  And, most importantly, it allowed nap time to stay intact! :0)

So, every other week, ten very talkative Daisies would descend on my house, eat their snack and start planting, painting, tracing, folding, cutting, gluing and drawing their way through their Flower Garden Journey.   It was a ton of fun.  But I have a new appreciation for teachers (and I had a lot of appreciation for them BEFORE) because after an hour and a half I was READY for this crew to go home.  They are great girls and did a phenomenal job on their Journey projects but 10 busy kindergartners is a lot for any one house (and momma) to accommodate!

We made "I AM" posters (Natalie accidentally mixed up her "a" and "m" in the word "am"...so cute... I couldn't ask her to correct it.) and then did flower craft projects that represented the different flower characters/petal colors that stand for different aspects of the Girl Scout Law. 

 Sunny the Sunflower is friendly and helpful.  Tula the tulip is courageous and strong.  Lupe the Lupine is honest and fair.  Gloria the Morning Glory respects herself and others and Mari the marigold is responsible for what she says and does.  The idea was they could hang these posters in their bedrooms over the summer and think, "I AM... all these wonderful things!" 

The bumblebee was just for fun and was my favorite project.

 They also planted their own mini gardens as a service project.  The seeds didn't get quite far enough along in the growing process before our sessions ended so now it's up to each girl to take care of her seeds until they blossom and then make the world a better place with them, either by giving them to someone else or planting them in her own yard for her family to enjoy.

 Natalie is very proud of all the patches and petals she earned this year!  The petals she earned sporadically throughout the year, the leaves she earned by selling so many cookie boxes and the patch down at the bottom she earned for our Flower Garden Journey!

 She also earned patches for participating in a parade, going to a cookie rally, taking part in her first ever cookie sale and celebrating the Juliette Gordon Low's
(the founder of Girl Scouts) birthday last fall.

 These were some of the gardens the girls grew. 

 And this is a blurry picture of the Girl Scout Law they all memorized and recited at each meeting.

And the Girl Scout Promise they also memorized and recited.

 

So much fun. 

Natalie will be a Daisy for one more year and then she moves on to Brownies.  Such a great organization and I was happy to be a part of it for a little while.