Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Month #3 -- Earning our Yellow Petals

We started this meeting by practicing the Girl Scout Promise. For less than $1.00 I bought a sheet of poster board and wrote out the Promise and the Law. I read the Promise to the girls once and then asked them to read it aloud with me. To earn our Yellow Petals, for being friendly and helpful, the girls were supposed to help out around the house without being asked. Most of the girls were able to give specific jobs they had helped with at home. Their moms were usually able to tell me if they had done well or not.
We then moved on to a story to help them thinking about our next petal, light green for being considerate and caring. Since this was our December meeting I chose to read them a story about Christmas. I chose a wonderful book about a bear who stays up after everyone else has gone to bed and makes presents for all of his friends, even though he can barely keep his eyes open. I started the conversation with them about what we care about this time of year and how to be considerate to families who are less fortunate. Each girl was given $0.50 to place in a Salvation Army bucket. I will ask the girls at the next meeting whether they kept the money for themselves or if they shared it with a family who could really use it.
Our craft for this month was to make Christmas ornaments. I would like to start a tradition with the girls in my troop. Every year they will make a new ornament that symbolizes what we are working on that year. This year I fell in love with some penguins made out of socks. I did have to do most of the prep work -- stuffing and sewing the socks, cutting out the felt pieces and as a special gift to the girls I made bead daisies for their ornaments to wear as necklaces.
Here is a picture of Sammi with her ornament. She colored his gray parts with a black fabric marker, but he's still pretty cute.
Sammi & Her Penguin
And you can download the instructions to make this ornament here, it is a PDF file.