Monday, May 6, 2013

Daisies: Petal Review

It's our next-to-last meeting and time for a petal review!

I cut construction paper into petal shapes and wrote the aspects of the Girl Scout Law on them, according to how many girls I expected at the meeting (you can adjust as needed for your troop). We cleared the tables and sat on the floor, in a circle, with me holding the Promise center.

Each girl had a petal and we went around the circle, with each girl giving an example of fulfilling the aspect of the Law that her petal represented.




We had snack, and then made friendship necklaces out of beads (Melissa & Doug has some great sets of wooden beads. These are what we used, but there are many other sets that are super cute), and I bought extra waxed cotton strands in the craft section at Walmart).




And lastly, we colored these pages:




Daisies: Violet Petal

Our last petal! Hooray!

Here's what we did:

Before the meeting, I'd spoken with a friend of mine who is a fellow Daisy leader, and lives across country. I got her troop number and address, and the number of girls so we had enough for them all.

Then I created "All About Us" handouts (which I'm not posting here, because they are very detailed about our troop, our service unit, and the area in which we live) for the girls to fill out. I got stickers with our Council name on them for the girls to include in the things they were making for the other troop.

And once our meeting started, we talked about the violet petal and what makes someone a sister. The girls were great. They offered up many suggestions, like if you have the same parents, or live in the same house, but we talked about things like step-families, and people who are not technically related to you, but are still considered part of your family.

We talked about how families love each other, they support each other, they stand up for and accept each other, too. And that it didn't matter if your family was near or far, they were still family. And that in Girl Scouts, we were family. We were all sisters.

The girls had a great time filling in their All About Us pages (which included a spot for them to draw or write their favorite thing about where we live), then had a snack.

After snack, we gave them construction paper and let them make special greeting cards for their sister troop way across the country.

And a few days later, I mailed it all off! We'll be excited to see what the other troop thinks of it. :)


Daisies: Pink (Rose) Petal

We've covered the dark green petal for Using Resources Wisely and I had to figure out something to come up with that wasn't environment-specific, necessarily, but would fit into Making the World a Better Place, for our pink petal.

After our initial activities (Kaper, Pledge, Promise, etc.), I had them gather into groups to work on this first bit.

We talked about how "caring for" can mean taking care of, or showing care (kindness, consideration, etc.) towards others. The girls brainstormed ways they can help care for the world around them.


After snack, we worked on some coloring pages for the Color-A-Smile organization. They provide the coloring page templates and your girls color them, then you mail them in to the organization, and they distribute the pages to nursing homes, VA hospitals, Meals on Wheels programs, etc. It's truly a wonderful organization!

Here are the pages we colored. I made sure the girls only wrote their first names, for privacy's sake:




We talked about how the simplest thing, like smiling at someone -- or coloring a picture for a strangers -- can help brighten a day and Make the World a Better Place!