Cookies! A Guide for Leaders New and Old

If you played the word association game with many people, a response to "Girl Scouts" would be "cookies".  Whatever else you might think about GSUSA, you have to admit they have done a tremendous marketing job transforming the necessary evil of fundraising into an American tradition and into business education for the girls. 

In most parts of the country "Christmas Season" is followed very quickly by "Cookie Season" and the leader facebook groups are filled with questions and complaints from leaders old and new.  As noted in my profile, I've been a Girl Scout leader for over 15 years and this post is an attempt to share the things I've learned with others.  However, the first piece of advice I have is to make friends with your Service Unit Cookie Chair.  She is the one who should know the rules in your council, and also what you can expect where you are. 

Learn Your Council's Rules

No councils, that I know of, allow girls to take the money earned by selling cookies and put it in their own pockets.  Most do not allow much if any differentiation between how the troop rewards low sellers vs high sellers at the Daisy and Brownie levels.  For older girls, council rules are all over the map as to how they allow cookie proceeds to be used and tracked on a per girl basis.  Some allow (or at least turn a blind eye toward) "girl accounts" where each girl's proceeds are tracked and allocated for her use for Girl Scout programming; others strictly enforce "troop money is for all the girls".  Knowing your council's rules on this is important when you get ready for the next step:  Talking to Parents

Honest and Fair, Board Games and Making Games

I have both Daisies and Brownies and I run one meeting for all the girls.  Generally we do Brownie Badges and I do my best to relate the topic to a Daisy Petal or Badge.  My goal for the year is to complete five petals as we did the other five last year.  One we needed this year was "Honest and Fair", which ties in nicely with Making Games.  Making Games also ties into the Daisy Board Game Badge so we've spent the last three meetings working on these badges, and we still have one more activity, which we will do at our holiday party. Many of the chosen activities were from the GGGS, VTK or River Valley's plans, which I summarized in this post.

Our first meeting was dedicated primarily to the Daisies.  I told the girls the story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and we talked about how if we aren't honest, people won't believe us.  We talked about games we liked and why they have rules, and how it isn't fun when someone we play with cheats.

Back in My Day: Comparing Today's Badges With Those of the Past

Back in the Stone Ages when we had the blue Junior handbook we didn't have any computer-related badges.  Of course back in those days, computers took up entire rooms, cost millions of dollars and could only be operated by experts.  Today, most of us carry a more powerful (and definitely more user-friendly) computer in our pocket/purse all day every day, and it even makes phone calls. That Girl Scout badges have changed should be of no surprise to anyone, but for some, the question is whether they have changed for the better, or the worse.  Today, I'm going to look at a badges that has  stood the test of time--the  "cooking badge"  in the Junior program--because "back in the day" there were no Daisies, Brownies did not earn badges and neither did high school girls.

FYI, the headings below are links to the summarized handbooks.

Savory Snacks, Knives, and JGL

Some of you will be glad to know that we finished our Snacks badge at our most recent meeting.  As I read the instructions for the Snacks badge, girls are supposed to make four different snacks.  We had a bad storm the night of our first meeting so several girls were absent.  Because of that, we repeated the energy snack requirement. In total, we spent part of five meetings working on the Snacks badge.

This week we made Ants on a Log and Spiders. Ants on a Log is celery sliced in 2-3 inch chunks and filled with peanut butter, cream cheese or some other sticky substance.  On top of that go the "ants", raisins. Spiders are two Ritz Crackers, stuck together with peanut butter etc. with four stick pretzels broken in half stuck in as legs.  Raisin eyes can be added.

After we did the Pledge, Promise and Law I sat the girls down and talked to them about using knives and knife safety, particularly passing knives handle first and waiting for the recipient to say "thank you".  I had large kitchen knives and cutting boards for the girls to use to cut up the celery.  I gave each girl a full rib of celery to cut into three or more pieces.  Since we don't have any peanut allergies, we used peanut butter to fill the logs.  Surprisingly to me, many of the girls didn't want the raisins.