Brownie Quest Take Action and Bridging Buddies

We participated in our service unit's Bridging Buddies activity. We got together and planted flowers at Scout House. This helped complete my Little Brownie's requirement to work with a younger troop (Troop 6787 Daisies). So now she has completed her Bringing requirements for next year!

Troop 6081 was also there and they will be bridging to Juniors this year. We had also visited with a Junior troop earlier in the year.

16 girls in attendance!

This project could not have worked out more perfectly. We had to brainstorm (4th time is a charm), the Who, What, Where, How Much, and Resources Needed for the project. We (each group) brought flowers to plant. I brought bottled water, another troop brought snacks, (3 first aid kits were within reach), and except for the storm that started brewing towards the end, it was a perfect and beautiful day for gardening.

Isn't it pretty?

The girls had a blast digging in the dirt and twittered like little birds the whole time! We had the opportunity to hand out 10 more Making Friends patches. I had already given 8 (If I remember correctly) to Troop 6081 last time we joined them for an activity.  I hope I can find a different patch for next year - my source is sold out!

So we are finally finished with Brownie Quest. We are going to continue to do badge work over the summer, but we haven't decided if we are going to try to knock out another journey yet. I am researching "Journeys in a Day" - and there are a lot of great ones to try. Makingfriends.com have Journeys in a Bag, but I'm not sure if it's worth purchasing a whole kit just for one girl. My Little Brownie isn't really concerned about the Summit Award, so I would have to show her what I find and let her decide. 

Here are my binder cards and I hope everyone has a great summer!

Brownie Quest Take Action

Brownie Quest Award

My Family Story Skill Building Badge

My Family Story is part of the Brownie Quest Skill Building Badge set.

  Step 1. Explore Family Stories: We spent a lot of time going through photo albums and my genealogy binders. I keep old photos, birth announcements, and obituaries in the genealogy binders. They are organized by family group sheets. I told her the family stories that I remembered. We read about how in the 1600's one of our ancestors was kidnapped by pirates and ransomed! One of our most notable family stories is about Frances Slocum. She was taken by Indians as a child and there is a state park in Pennsylvania and a state forest in Indiana dedicated to her. There have been some books & publications written about several of my ancestors as well, so I shared some of those with her.

  Step 2. Know Where Your Family is From: We got a lot of info from our family Gedcom. We have English, Irish, Dutch, German & American Indian (Mohican-Wappinger) heritage. We put tacks in the world map to show everywhere we have ancestors. (That we know of...) I printed off the flags from those countries and we used them as cupcake toppers for a cupcake decorating party!

  Step 3. Make a Story Tree: We used the template provided in the pamphlet for this activity. I converted it into Photo Shop and we added pictures of family members to complete the worksheet. She has 8 grown brothers and sisters, so we put them in as family groups - though we still ran out of spots! We added journaling after I got this picture to post.                                                                                                                       Step 4. Find an Object That Means Something to Your Family: Since we don't have any family heirlooms (except for a small coin collection my father gave me), we decided that our scrapbooks fit that bill. We did talk about the coin collection as well. She loved looking through the old coins. It represents time that I spent with my father while we sorted coins for it, so our scrapbooks would represent that time spent together for us.

  Step 5. Share Your Family Story: We added some pages to our scrapbooks. I do chronological photos and journaling in our scrapbooks, so we updated several weeks worth!

My Family Story Binder Card

A Visit With A Junior Troop

Last night we went to a meeting with Troop 6710 in Beebe, AR. The leader is a parent in my daughter's old troop, and has a Junior troop of her own. They are working on the Agent of Change Leadership Journey. This visit was spurred by the bridging requirements to work with an older troop and a younger troop. (I have requested a list of Daisy troops in our area, so that next year we can hopefully work with a younger troop.)

Since there would be an extra girl in the meeting, (my girl) I felt obliged to whip up a kaper chart for this visit so that all of the girls would get a kaper. I wish I had added small tags to label each bracelet, but since it was a last minute idea, I was kind of squeezed on time. We had to look at the box each time we moved to another activity and it was a hassle. And why, yes, that IS a tissue box (very handy and self contained for a kaper chart).


I could even have added a green bracelet if we'd had one more girl. General Assistant got opening and unplanned stuff, and Quality Control was to take care of closing and make sure that the room was left better than we found it.

We wanted the girls to get something out of the meeting that applied to both levels. My Little Brownie is working on Brownie Quest. We decided to do the "I'm Being Framed" activity where the girls add positive descriptive words to a self-portrait. We found an awesome template file for that here. (The file link is way at the bottom of her very inspiring blog post.) This activity ties into both journeys, and hey, it never hurts to take a few minutes to remind our girls how awesome they are.

I was so tickled to see the girls working on this project because even though they all started out with the same materials - every single picture was unique - just like every girl!

I wish I had taken the time to create a doc file with more words, but the girls also hand-wrote some of their own. A couple of the girls even drew their own portrait instead of using the templates.

Two girls came in late after I took these pics, we got everything back out and let them each do one too -and I'm kicking myself for not getting pics of their posters as well...

We took a few minutes to talk about Juliette Gordon Low and the upcoming birthday of Girl Scouting with some history trivia about the first troop in Savannah, GA.

All in all, everybody enjoyed themselves and each girl got something out of the activity that they will hopefully carry in their hearts. Each girl was able to see that their individual talents and personality traits are strengths and valuable additions to their Girl Scout teams.

This activity fulfilled one of the requirements for both Brownie Quest Discover Key and Agent of Change Power of One, which are in the first session to use words or pictures to tell others about who you are.

I took the opportunity at the end of the meeting to give each of the girls a fun patch in appreciation of sharing their meeting with us and giving us an opportunity to make new friends. My Little Brownie and I really love visiting with other troops and joining in events where other troops are present.

And of course, I went straight home after the meeting and made a scrapbook layout for the occasion. For this post, of course, I had to alter the picture to hide these lovely young ladies' faces - sorry! I posted the unaltered pictures for the parade in December, but that was a public event. Now that I am a little better at Photoshop, I can make one for Troop 6533 that included us in their parade!

Until next time, my wonderful Juliette Friends!

Connect Key

Tonight we merged sessions 2 & 3 for convenience. We have 2 Service Unit events coming up and I didn't want to split up the badge work in case we don't have time next week.

We started out with the Promise & Law and talked for a few minutes about last week's session and what we learned about ourselves and our family to earn the Discover Key. I gave her a card that I printed up with the Discover Key on it, but I wont iron on any badges until she earns the whole leadership set for the journey - just for neatness sake.

Session 2 has a team building exercise where you either pass a hoola hoop or a ball back and forth down the line to learn how to problem solve, listen to your teammates and work together. We wrote up a team agreement to help each other and listen to each other. We did the ball activity because my oldest daughter and I are so much taller than my 7 year old that it would not have been fun for any of us. Passing the ball using our ankles was hysterical! I wish I'd had a way to get a video of it. We dropped the ball often and laughed for a good 10 minutes, but we finally figured out a technique to pass it successfully enough (though not really gracefully).

(The blue cast is a trick of the light)

Next, there is an activity where we try to find ways for Campbell in the Brownie Quest story to help out at home. Then we talked about ways that my little Brownie can help out at home...

I moved on from there to figure out ways to show family we care by finding a Healthy-Living Family Activity that we can do together. There are some pretty good looking healthy recipes that we are going to try out this week to satisfy this requirement.

From Session 3: We hung up her Family Star from last week and made a circle map showing our connections from "Me" to Family to the Girl Scout Sisterhood, to the Community then to the World. We talked about who is in each group and ways to show how we care. For the letter writing part, we decided to write to the County Road Dept. about the grass growing up waist high at the bus stop. The wasps like that grass and pester the kids while they wait for the school bus in the morning.


So, now we have learned how to connect as a team, with our family, and our community. And there is our Connect Key!

For our upcoming session 4, we have to have a Take Action Project. We have decided to participate in the food drive at the Service Unit's Fall Festival by bringing canned goods to donate. I will also be taking her to donate gently used clothes and toys to a women's shelter.



**Newsflash! The brownie pin
gets to turn right side up! 

My little brownie has completed 

3 good deeds without being asked!



Fun Patches earned this week:
Pumpkin Patch
Corn Maze
Hay Ride

Until Next time!

Finally Getting the Ball Rolling

It seems like the last almost 2 weeks since we made the decision to Juliette (I made this a verb) has been tied up in admin stuff. I've been waiting on books, materials, and badges to come in the mail and looking up activities and crafts to plan out at least the first couple of months of our brownie year.

Today has been an exciting day for us because our Juliette ID strip came in the mail. Happy Dance! This was the biggest pain to find and an even bigger challenge to get ahold of. The Girl Scout Council of Suffolk County had these little gems. You can call them at 631-543-6622 and ask for the shop. They only charged me $1 apiece and that included shipping.


After and exhausting search, I found a picture of the placement of the Juliette ID strip, but it is not mentioned anywhere in any official printed guide that I have read. I think I have scoured at least 40 council guides.

As you can see this is a vest setup from before the Journeys program, but they really haven't altered the placement of that section. I think I'm going to run with it... The nice recruitment lady that I spoke to said that I am attached to Service Unit 617, so I still need to find out if that is the number I use under the crest - which we haven't chosen yet.

**Update from nice lady at our Council: The correct uniform is to leave the numbers off.

So with the arrival of the leaders guide and Journey materials, we finally had our first meeting tonight. Yay!


First Meeting:

We chose Brownie Quest to start out our year. I like it because it introduces the characters and in the story "the Brownies uncover how Low, the founder of the Girl Scout Movement, discovered, connected, and took action as an early-20th-century leader." Sweet! Her birthday is this month, so that is perfect.

I wasn't going to post my incomplete display board, but I thought, what the heck. It will evolve over time. It would have looked better if I had a full roll of decorative duct tape instead of the last 5 inches left over from my last project. We started out with The Promise and The Law, which neither of us remembered from last year. (That was the first thing to go up on the board.) That awesome Brownie Quest map came with the leader's guide. The badges to check off as we go are up there in pink, and a calendar that already has 2 council events that we are registered for this month.

The first activity we did was have my little Brownie fill out the "All About Me" that I found at the Fashionable Moms blog.

Next we bounced a ball to each other and called out our good qualities. My oldest daughter did this with us. She was in Girl Scouts about 10 years ago in high school, so she couldn't resist. This activity was harder than it sounds because nobody really focuses on their own good qualities - so we all just drew a blank when it was our turn - but we managed to muddle through it with lots of laughter. It's a good thing it wasn't supposed to play out like "hot potato"! We went around 4 times and called it good.

We didn't have a group to do the Girl Scout Law search, so I had printed up a word find for her to search for keywords in the Law. I found it here.

Next we moved on to the Brownie Quest Family Star activity where we figured out which law best applied to our family. We settled on Honest and Fair, then talked about why we felt it applied to us for a few minutes. On each point of the star we wrote in a different family member and listed a special quality or skill that they possessed.

So the Leader's guide tells me that we found/earned the Discover Key tonight - cool. Filling out the Star sheet was supposed to be a take home, but we just did it in the session.

The last thing that we did for tonight's session was to read the first chapter of the Brownie Quest Activity book which introduced the characters and the quest that they are on. The story makes a nice ending to the session. I have to say that my daughter wasn't the only one that got something out of the whole thing. She had some nice things to say to me and my oldest daughter, and I got to tell her what I thought her good qualities are - it was a good night.

**Bonus Round** We had a chance to make our first swap of the year! There was a lady on the Juliette Girl Scout leaders Facebook page that has a daughter doing the 50 States Swap badge. My daughter has been so excited that she couldn't decide what to do. I kinda had to talk her down a bit, but we settled on this.

I have to trim the tag - 'cause that's how I roll, lol. She gets to fill out the envelope in the morning because she is doing friendly letters in her Writing Skills class - win/win!

By the way, she asked me to pass it along, so if anyone is interested in the 50 States Swap, I can hook you up, but I've got Arkansas covered.

Until next time, my Juliette sisters...