Getting Started with Brownies Part Three -- Agenda

For our first year of Brownies, I've got the (loose) dates set up for meetings .

The plan is to meet the first and third Friday of each month, for an hour and 15 minutes right after school. Having meetings last this long allows us to have time for two activities/games, a snack, and includes time for the Pledge, Promise, Law, etc. We often have time left over, even, to go out and play (which all the girls love, of course!).

The first year we will be focusing on Legacy and Cookie-related badges. For those of you who are looking for information on Brownie Journey badges, you'll have to head on over to Google and Pinterest. We're not planning on incorporating Journeys this year. That's next year's agenda. Maybe. However, I will be posting details on each badge we're working on here as we go, and you may find some activities that you could use towards a Journey (I hope!).

Given our meeting days (based upon our school year, and taking into account vacation/holiday time) here's our agenda plan:

Meeting 1 - Welcome and Intro to Brownies
Meeting 2 - Brownie GS Way
Meeting 3 - Brownie GS Way contd.
Meeting 4 - Painting
Meeting 5 - Brownie First Aid
Meeting 6 - Celebrating Community (for us, this hits in December, a great time to focus on community)
Meeting 7 - Snacks
Meeting 8 - Intro to Cookie Sales
Meeting 9 - Cookies Meet My Customer
Meeting 10 - Fair Play
Meeting 11 - Cookies Financial Literacy
Meeting 12 - Bugs
Meeting 13 - Catch Up/Bonus Day for whatever we need to catch up on
Meeting 14 - Last meeting of the year - Review and Fun!

Non-Meeting - End-of-the-Year Party/Ceremony

You are allowed to earn one Financial Literacy and one Cookie Business badge per year.

EDIT: Some leaders prefer to have the girls create the agenda from the get-go, first year of Brownies. I did talk to the girls about which badges they wanted to work on (they really wanted to do Painting -- so much so that it would've required at least two meetings, and we had too many snow days to include it, so we're saving it for year two), but there were some badges I felt were important, foundational ones that we really needed to include (GS Way, First Aid, Community, etc.). Plus, I had to schedule visitors far in advance, so the badges that had an outside expert come in had to be pretty well set in stone.

We ended up booting Fair Play in favor of camp-themed activities instead. This was the girls' choice.

As always, you do what works best for your troop. This is just basically a sample of how to set up a rough itinerary for the school year. In year two, the girls will be determining the agenda and which badges/patches we work on. Give them as much opportunity for leadership/input as possible, while keeping it age- and troop-appropriate. You know your girls better than some other leader would. So you do what's best for your troop. :)