February Meeting

Hi Parents,

Tuesday was another fun meeting!

We started off with the Girl Scout Promise and talked about how they earned their "change a story" award for the great work they did on the book drive. Our "new" girls got their "hear a story" badge as well. Check their backpacks for these badges. Here's a photo of how their sashes should look at this point. Only returning girls will have the gold and green star. We had a few questions about the patches, and just to clarify, the front of their sash is for their "earned" badges like painting and the story badges. The back of their sash is for their "fun" patches like Wicked. Eventually the story badges will all fit together like what you see below.

During our opening, we played a variation of the game Bingo with the girls. Each girl had the same sheet of paper with 25 squares. Each square had something like: has curly hair, likes to sing in the shower, is wearing sneakers. The girls had to go around and "interview' each other to see who's name they could put in each box. Ava was the first to shout Bingo, but we kept going to see if they could fill out all the boxes. Some boxes were hard to fill out like - who doesn't like pizza!

Next we had snack and introduced the next badge the girls will work on. BUGS!! Their snack bags of goldfish and grapes were pinched together with clothespins to look like butterflies. 

During snack, we showed the girls how to make the craft project that is step 2 of the bug badge. The girls were excited to paint their clothespins and cut paper to make dragonflies. After that they made tissue paper flowers for their dragonfly to live on. Some of the girls had made tissue paper flowers before and were great helpers for the girls who hadn't.

We then had a discussion with the girls about advertising, which will eventually lead us into their "tell a story" badge. We spoke about how most ads are trying to sell us something by telling us a story. We showed a bunch of different ads and the girls took turns telling what they thought the story was. We had everything from spring fresh cleaners, to yummy looking dog food. We had a lot of fun with that and had to convince the girls that we didn't *really* think the dog food looked delicious!!

After that we talked about ads that aren't trying to sell a product and are actually trying to raise awareness for a good cause - PSAs. We showed a couple of examples of ads in magazines and then we showed a couple of videos from the site www.values.com. They loved these videos, so you might want to share some more with them at home.

We closed the meeting with our friendship circle. Thank you Jen (Ava's mom) for volunteering at this meeting!

There is some Brownie "fun work" for the next meeting. We would like the girls to complete step 1 of their Bug Badge. This is in their big brown binder. Step 1 is to make a poster of a bug of their choice (insects and spiders are considered bugs for this badge) and answer the questions about their bug. We would love to have a mini science fair at the end of our next meeting and invite the parents.

Best wishes and looking forward to our MoMA trip this weekend.

Michelle and Martha