Daisies, Year 2, Meeting 17

When the journeys were introduced, I was out of the loop of Girl Scouting.  When I finally got back in the loop and learned about them, I was honestly a little jealous that we didn't have them when I was scout!

Today we began our final Daisy journey, Between the Earth and Sky.  This is such a neat journey because it centers around a trip the flower friends take.  We purposely planned to do this journey right now because the girls are in the middle of cookie season.  They did the basic planning work for their cookie reward/end of the year trip, but since we don't have cookies in hand yet, it's a little hard for them to grasp what exactly it is they are working towards.  Listening to this story was exactly the boost they needed to keep them on track for their final goal (which as I write this months later, we are currently days away from our trip!).

The leader's guide and guidebook has several great activities that fit in with what we are doing.  The first one is really neat.  The leader's guide calls it the big blue bucket of words.  The original lesson intrigued me, but we changed it up a little.  But, first things first- our official club house. We were getting ready to talk about feelings and emotions.  This is touchy with any age group.  So we created Daisy's club house.  Daisy's club house has a few rules- this is a safe space, so anything we talk about stays in the club house.  We won't talk about it outside of our meetings because we want to trust each other (something we will build upon over the years).  After we had that established, we asked the girls, what are negative words that you have heard that can be hurtful?  I won't repeat them, but they came up with some very good answers.  We wrote them all down on the chalk board.  We took a good look at them and then erased them from our vocabulary.  We all promised that we would never use these hurtful words again, in and our of meetings.  With those sad words still in our heads, we then began talking about happy words, or as we named our own blue bucket of words, Words of Affirmation.  We all took a slip of paper and secretly wrote a happy word down, but we didn't read them.  We all folded it up and stuck it in the bucket.

I read my word out loud though, and this was the only time I did this.  I had a very good reason too.  We hadn't been out to work in our garden in a while.  Even though we walk past it every week when we walk to our meeting spot, sometimes we forget to look left.  The garden was our responsibility, and had gathered some weeds of the past few weeks.  It had also been trampled in one part.  We were very honest with the girls about it, but did not want it to dampen their spirits.  So my word of the week was perseverance.  Though it may seem like such a small word, when put into the context of our garden and take action project, it was such a big, positive word that lifted everyone's spirits.

We finished out the meeting doing some role playing and learning how to properly deal with play ground bullies.  Everyone was asked to act out some scenarios.  They did a great job and learned how to handle things without getting in trouble, getting peoples feelings hurt and where to go for help.