Animals Around Us

At the last meeting we took a walk around the school to see if we could find animals, animal signs, animal sounds or animal houses.  The girls heard birds, found holes in the school garden that a small animal lives in and found animal food.  It was a beautiful sunny day, but it was also cold and windy.  We went inside to start a surprise project and read about animals from Japan.  Another fantastic meeting!

Our Easter Celebration

We dove into our Robin Award last Tuesday and read a story about animals from Mexico.  We also learned some new words in Spanish such as "queso" the Spanish word for cheese.  In one of the pictures below the girls are yelling "queso!"

We also talked about Easter, had a friendship egg hunt and decorated Easter bonnets with bunny ears. 
Each girl found three eggs and then helped their friends find the remaining eggs.  When the girls found every egg hidden in the room we made sure everyone had an equal amount of small candies and stickers.  This tied in to our "honest and fair" petal.

A huge welcome to our new Girl Scout!  We're very excited to have you in the troop!

This is our end of the meeting friendship handshake.  The girls love it and they take turns being the person that starts the handshake.

Our Awards Ceremony 

The girls worked so hard the first few months of scouts and earned all of their Daisy petals as well as their birdbath award.  We had our first awards ceremony in February and we invited family and friends to attend.  The girls showed off some of their projects and we had a chance to take a full group picture!

This was our Valentine's Day celebration!  We gave all of the girls "wings" and encouraged them to flap and dance like different birds.  We picked out a few fun bird songs like "Rockin' Robin" and called out different bird names.  The girls dance/flapped the way they thought that particular bird would.  Their favorite birds were blue jays, eagles and penguins.  Just for fun we added in a few Fresh Beat Band songs at the end.

After our bird dancing we called the girls back to the circle and showed them the Valentine's Day mice they would be creating.  We had a lot of fun putting the felt pieces together and gluing the eyes, tail and nose on the mice.   We also handed out Valentines to each other and had a great snack. 

While learning about animals the Daisy troop also spent part of each meeting learning about the Daisy petals.  Each petal represents part of the Girl Scout Law which is:

I will do my best to be

honest and fair,

friendly and helpful,

considerate and caring,

courageous and strong

and responsible for 

what I say and do, 

and to 

respect myself and others, 

respect authority,

use resources wisely,

make the world a better place, 

and be a sister to every Girl Scout. 

We talked with the girls about the meanings of the petals and tried to incorporate a number of fun projects to help them learn.  

At this meeting we broke into groups and started a number of fun projects.  We drew self portraits and wrote about what we do on a daily basis to take care of ourselves.  Some of the captions said "I see clean teeth" and "I see brushed hair."  The next table decorated thank you notes for the police officers and firemen in our town and the last table started in on our first animals mural - birds. 

A little more birdbath decorating.  

Girl Scouting build girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place. 

We chose to take the girls through an animals journey this year called "3 Cheers For Animals - It's Your Story - Tell It."  The journeys teach the girls to discover themselves and their values, connect with others and take action to improve their communities and the world.   

At our first meeting we created a birdbath out of paper mache.  We talked about how we can care for birds and how birds care for themselves.  We then painted the birdbath and colored in birds for the bath.  It was a little messy and a lot of fun.