Mother's Day Project and Finishing a Journey!

We have our last "classroom" meeting of the school year tonight. The girls will be finishing their second journey, "Between Earth and Sky" and receiving their journey patches.

I am excited about our Mother's Day craft tonight. I had bought some old teacup and saucer sets when the service unit was trying to decide what to do for Thinking Day. We ended up not using them and that left me with 9 sets to find a use for. I also have left over GS cookies my troop paid for to use up, so I'm throwing them into the mix. I decided to try making teacup bouquets with the girls.

You will need:
Teacups/Saucers -- they don't have to match
Hot Glue Gun
Styrofoam Balls cut in half -- use a bread knife
Coffee Filters
Spray Bottle of Water
Washable Markers
Plastic Cling Wrap
Popsicle sticks
Cookies
Lollipops

The only prep work that is necessary before your meeting would be to cut the Styrofoam balls in half and to hot glue the cups to the saucers.

To start, give each girl a coffee filter (I have a huge package I got at the dollar store), flatten it out and have them each color a design around the outside edge. Now this is where I recommend having a second adult on hand. If you have a spritz or spray bottle you can just mist the coffee filters with water, it will make the markers run and look very pretty. They dry pretty fast. If you don't have a spray bottle, the girls can lightly flick water drops onto the filter to get the colors to run. This should be done on a paper towel to save the work surface and extra hands can help dab off extra water to speed drying.

I then placed the coffee filter into the teacup, trying to leave a little bit out. Place one of the halved Styrofoam balls into the cup. Depending on the size of the cup and the size of the Styrofoam balls, you may have to put it in dome-up or dome-down. I don't think it really matters which. Press it firmly down in, the coffee filter should create a kind of ruffle around the opening of the teacup.

The next step was to stick the lollipops and cookies in as the "flowers." The lollipops don't need anything done to them but the cookies do. I used 1 cookie with a Popsicle stick and then wrapped it tightly in plastic cling wrap. I considered tearing the cling wrap in advance but then I realized I'd have a huge mess on my hands, so I'm going to draft one of the troop volunteers to tear them off and keep them orderly.

After putting all the "flowers" into my bouquet I was done! It was a fun and easy craft and I hope the girls will really have fun with it. I have a lot of cookies for them to use if they want so the bouquets can be much fuller than the one I have pictured here. The best part is, if the girls want a treat tonight, we'll have cookies on hand!

Our fashion projects are complete!

I am so excited to announce that my girls have finished their fashion projects! Our last project was for each girl to design her own hat to reflect her personality. I was so pleased with how unique each girl's hat was.

If you'd like to see a little description of each girl's design, please just hold your mouse over their picture as it "falls" in the slide show!

A busy month!

We've had a busy month selling Girl Scout cookies, but thankfully I will be turning in the money and reports tomorrow and we'll be officially done. The girls sold very well, exceeding my goals by far.

We celebrated World Thinking Day on February 22nd. I decided to head up the event to help our Event Coordinator. We decided to learn about Fiji, Australia, Mexico, India and Hong Kong. We chose the countries from the list of 145 countries in the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. We made leis for Fiji, paper fans for Hong Kong, Gods Eyes for Mexico, ate Pavlovas for Australia and decorated the girls' hands with "henna" tattoos for India.

We were able to send our pen pal troop in Wisconsin a letter with some SWAPs and a map about South Dakota to help them learn about us. I am excited to read their letter to my troop this week, and to hand out the SWAPs they sent. We also completed our flip-flop slippers, one of the last steps to finishing our Fashion patches. You can see the directions at the FamilyFun website here.

This week I would like to take a break from our journey book and have a review of the Girl Scout Law. We have been having some behavior issues at meetings and events and I would like to remind the girls of how they need to apply the Law to their everyday lives -- that it is not just something we say at the beginning of every meeting. I plan to play a game with the girls, reading situations to them and asking what parts of the Girl Scout Law were broken in each one. There is usually more than one answer and I think the girls will have an easy time figuring it out. For each correct answer I will put a marble into a jar and I will tell the girls if they can finish the game as a team with the jar full to a certain point, they will get a special treat. I will have a treat like cookies on hand to give them before they go home. The real treat will be the patches I have on order from MakingFriends:

To see the situations and answers for the GS Law Quiz, you can download a .pdf file here.

It's SWAP time!

I am so excited about SWAPs this year! We were not able to have a council sponsored cookie rally this year, so the leaders decided to have our own rally and combine it with our SWAP. The theme of the SWAP is cookies. My girls made Cookie Monster!

I was fortunate enough to have my co-leader, Katie, cut out the little discs of brown cardstock on her new Cricut machine. Then using a hole punch, I made "bite" marks in each cookie (600 of them!) I found the blue pompoms on eBay, although I had to buy in quantity and we will definitely be using them in our crafts for some time.

We are also doing Leader SWAPs, and they don't have to be cookie themed. I decided to make a pin with Juliette Gordon Lowe's portrait on it.

My co-leader, Becke, just had a baby 2 months ago so I knew she wouldn't have time to make her own, so I found this adorable idea online, it's Clippy Longstocking!

And my other co-leader, Katie, works full time so I decided to help her out too. I made these simple Daisy Insignia Tabs in no time at all.

This week I finished sewing the girls' SWAP sashes as well as the 3 leaders' sashes. The girls will be carrying their SWAPs in their fleece water bottle bags. I think we're ready, now we just have to wait for the day of the SWAPs to get here!

2010/2011 Daisy Cookie Exchange

When I planned our troop's Christmas party, I originally planned to have a small cookie exchange in my home and making "cookie" ornaments for the girls to put on their trees at home. Well, after the November leaders' meeting, I felt that I needed to invite the 2 other Daisy troops to our exchange. The girls in the other troops are all new to Girl Scouts this year and I wanted my girls to get to know them, after all, the law says: "...and be a sister to every Girl Scout."

I found a recipe to make play clay and color it with baking cocoa, my goal being that the ornaments look like gingerbread. Here is the recipe from FamilyFun magazine. The ornaments I made were basically a gingerbread girl and tinier gingerbread girl (I have a gingerbread family cookie cutter set.) Since our exchange was Mom & Me, I thought the ornaments should reflect that.

Our original date had to be canceled because of snow and because I had a bad case of the stomach flu. So finally we were able to hold the event after the first of the year. I was excited to have so many RSVPs but I was very upset to discover that I only had 16 usable ornaments -- and 22 RSVPs! At the last minute I went to Wal-Mart and found round treat containers, similar to tupperware that were only 12 for $1.00! So the girls decorated their new treasure boxes -- the funny thing was that exactly 16 girls made it to the exchange so we would have had enough ornaments after all.