October 2 2022

Daisy Petal Plans from VTK

Troop Leader Resources    4 Comments    , ,

I’ve served as a mentor to new leaders in our service unit for a few years now, and to get right to the point, the Volunteer Toolkit isn’t for everybody as we all know.  It’s a horse that we’ve beaten to death, so I’m not going to go into its shortcomings and why some new leaders don’t use it. But they should have the opportunity to see the activity plans that are available as a programming option, so to help them out, I pulled them down and consolidated all of them into one document:

Daisy Petal Plans

It features the newly revised petal plans. It comes in at a hefty 61 pages, so get your printer in shape if you want a hard copy. I find it crazy that I received a 4 page document of petal ideas when I started as a Daisy leader in 2010, and now we’re at a 61 page scripted meeting plan. Times change, I guess.

If you see anything that needs to be edited, please let me know. Continue reading

September 8 2022

The Three Little Pigs and a Contract

National Operations    2 Comments    , , , ,

Once upon a time, there were three little pigs. Each one built his own house to protect himself from the Big Bad Wolf. The first piggy built his house out of straw. The second piggy built his house out of sticks. The third piggy built a custom house made out of many different materials with no blueprint.

One day, the Big Bad Wolf came to the first piggy’s house built out of straw and said, “Little pig, little pig, let me in!” The first piggy yelled out, “Not by the hairs on my chinny chin chin!” The Big Bad Wolf replied, “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!” The Big Bad Wolf took a big breath, and the house built out of straw fell apart quickly when he exhaled. The first piggy grabbed what he could and ran to the second piggy’s house, which was built out of sticks. Continue reading

September 6 2022

UNOFFICIAL Memory Books!

Troop Leader Resources    10 Comments    , , , , , , , ,

A few years ago, the Greater Iowa council came up with Memory Books for girls (and leaders too, I suppose). I vaguely remember what they looked like, but I thought it was a great idea, especially considering girls don’t have their own handbooks these days due to the way GSUSA has arranged national programming.  GSUSA took the idea and ran with it, and soon afterward, published its own version in 2019:

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August 21 2022

Two New OFFICIAL Scarves and a Surprise!

Random Things That Don't Fit Anywhere Else Kinda Like Me    2 Comments   

A few months, a couple of OFFICIAL scarves were put on sale on the GSUSA online shop which means they’re being retired. You can count on all OFFICIAL scarves being eventually put out to pasture, so if you see one you like, don’t wait to get it (unless it’s $150 and you want to wait it out for the inevitable mark down).  But OFFICIAL scarf retirements mean that new ones will arrive! And arrive they did!  Continue reading

August 16 2022

2022-23 National Programming Summaries

Troop Leader Resources    8 Comments    , , , , , , ,

Addendum 8/6/23: You can find 2023-24’s summaries here.
Example pages

A while back, I wanted to streamline the Badge Explorer (which has a lot of wasted space for printing) and include all of the awards that aren’t featured.  So I put together these summaries of each level, and I update them every year. I’ve made them every year for the past few, and I recently realized I had never published them on my blog!

Updates for 2022-23 include:

  • Retired financial planning badges removed
  • New badges added
  • Global Action & World Thinking Day Awards added
  • Daisy petals updated

Continue reading