Next Year's prep, take 2!

For those of you who follow this blog, I'm sure all of you have figured out by now that I have a very "type A" personality.  It can be annoying to some, but when it comes to planning out things for kids, it has its benefits.  After re-reading my list of "challenges," I got to work!

My eighth challenge that I listed was finding a new co-leader, as our troop will be splitting up after our first graders bridge this year.  That challenge, thankfully, I have completed.  The best part, it's a friend who's daughter will be one of our new Daisy's next year.  I've known her for almost six years now, and I am so thankful that she will be my new co-leader!

My first challenge that I tasked myself with was coming up with activities for the petals next year that are different than this year's.  So far, I have the SWAP project and Flat Juliette to start us out.  Also to work with will be our two journeys, Welcome to the Daisy Flower Garden, and Between the Earth an Sky.  Meeting two, we plan on diving right into the petal "be a sister to every Girl Scout," by knocking out our SWAPs.  Meeting three we plan on diving into Welcome to the Daisy Flower Garden.  This seems like the perfect way to start out the year, as this book truly introduces the girls to Girl Scouting.  That also leads us into our fourth meeting.  Our fourth meeting, tentatively, will involve planting a garden at the school we meet at.  We're working on getting our materials donated for this project.  No decision has been made yet, so fingers crossed!  The next few meetings we're still working on, however, we did come up with a terrific idea on what to do for Founder's Day.  While looking through some of the free books Kindle has to offer, I stumbled upon the Girl Scout handbook from 1925.  That gave us the idea to come up with a way to earn a badge from this handbook or any other "old" handbook.  

Challenge number ten obviously goes hand in hand with our meeting plans.  It has been trying to work this in, but we're getting it, slowly.  The Discover portion seems to be easy for the Daisy aged girls.  Planting and caring for a garden is one of the many ways they can discover.  Connect has been presenting us with a small challenge, but as we look closer into Between the Earth and Sky, we have realized that this journey is perfect for this.  Take Action is iffy right now.  There are portions that we are able to incorporate here and there, but others we're trying to figure out how to show this to our girls.  More importantly, trying to incorporate the leadership skills for this age of scouts is difficult.  Luckily, we have all summer to work on challenger ten.

Backing up to challenge seven, that SWAP project.  Somehow, with very little effort, it's managed to work itself out.  I do have a partner in crime, and she has been wonderful (I know you read my blog Heather, so again, thanks for your help, it is invaluable!!!).  We're slowly getting more people who are interested.  We do have some international troops who want to participate, and that is completely awesome, on so many levels!  I am so looking forward to kicking this off next year.  My new Co and I have a few cute, and cheap ideas we're looking into for our SWAP.  This past weekend, at the Centennial Bridging and Sunrise Ceremony, my daughter collected quite a few cute SWAPs that have given me lots of new ideas.  I think this week I will sit down and look at them.

Looking at challenge two again, working in our journey books, has obviously provided us with a lot of good material.  As I said before, Welcome to the Daisy Flower Garden is absolutely perfect as an introduction to scouting.  After reading the book and the accompanying leaders guide, I felt like I had very little work to do.  The leaders guide was an excellent compass for planning out our meetings.  At this very moment, I have not finished reading Between the Earth and Sky, as I had to exchange it for a working copy (my original copy was printed upside down and backwards, but thankfully I was able to exchange it for a good copy).  In what I did read so far, I have picked up on two themes- travelling and feelings.  A good friend of mine was telling me a little about the journey she's doing with her junior troop.  They've been doing a bit with feelings, and have created a safe space within their meetings by having a "secret clubhouse."  Knowing that we're going to touch on this, with our second journey, I realized that it would be imperative for us to create a similar safe place.  This is something we'll have to get into later.

Ok, so what exactly have I been babbling about this whole time, and will do in another post?  Preparedness.  This amazing article sums most of it up.  It is important to prepare ahead of time to make sure that your troop is getting everything they can out of scouting, and to keep everything together in an orderly fashion.

And now, for my next set of challenges, starting up a new troop sooner, rather than later.... as in next month.  Fingers crossed!