Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Daisies Year 2, Meeting 12

We, GSUSA are a MO (member organization) within WAGGGS (World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts).  WAGGGS currently has four world centers with a fifth in the works.  One of the world centers is our Sangam which is located in Pune, India (to put it in better perspective, it's not too far from Mumbai). The Sangam Friendship Project is an easy project that any troop can do.  They have asked us to send in friendship bracelets. They sell these friendship bracelets to help raise money for things like children's camp and to help raise awareness on various projects, such as Stop the Violence.

Today we worked on the petal friendly and helpful.  We read Sunny's story from the guide book to start us out.  It was a great story on how to make new friends feel welcomed and how to overall be nice.  The girls were feeling a little sluggish, so we played some games.  We didn't initially intend to play games, but it gave us a good in on how to be friendly and helpful to our GS sisters.

Last week when we earned our cookie business leaf, we also talked about places we want to visit in the future (when the girls are old enough).  We mentioned the possibility of visiting one of the world centers, including the Sangam.  What better a way to be friendly and helpful than making friendship bracelets for the Sangam's project?!  We did exactly that.  We had very little time, so made simple bracelets (I don't know the name, but you take 3 pieces, knot one end, twirl it till it's spun up, fold it in half and let it gather up on itself, then knot up the two end pieces).  The girls were told that they could make a bracelet for themselves, one to give a friend, and one to give to the Sangam.  We went over our goal and made plenty extras to send to India, yay!

Next week we'll be earning the My Promise, My Faith pin.

Daisies, Year 2, Meeting 11

I feel the need to start out this blog by saying I absolutely love the Daisy journey Welcome to the Daisy Flower Garden!  It is the perfect "first thing" for Daisies to do because it introduces them to the world of Girl Scouts.  I think it was so beautifully done and I am so glad we got a chance to do it this year, especially with all of the new girls we had.

Sadly though, we finished up this journey today.  We learned so much from it though, especially with our Take Action project.  The garden is far from done though, and we plan to keep it up as long as we meet at this school.  There was one thing that we did differently to finish this journey.  The end of the story, we see the girls write a letter to future girl scouts.  There is also an activity for us to do that as well.  We will not be doing that activity until the end of our year, and we will be giving it to a new Daisy troop next year.  I thought it would be a great thing for them to do to finish out their year and help them bridge.

Our next item on the agenda was the cookie business leaf.  Earlier this year, the girls decided that they wanted to visit Juliette Gordon Low's house for their end of the year party, so today was a chance to talk about that.  Visiting the house is not free, so the girls need to earn some money to do this!  We looked up how much it would cost per girl (the fee for the program they want to do, their lunch, and patches), how much we earned per box (which isn't that much) and translated it to how many boxes everyone needs to sell.  We also talked about other things we wanted money for, like paying for next year's registration, Brownie uniforms, journey books and more.  In the end, we were able to come up with our goal and make a more concrete list of how we want to spend that money.  It's a great lesson for the girls on basic budgeting, saving and earning money.

Next week we'll be working on a really great project!