Junior Flowers Badge

 

Today my Juniors started the Flowers badge, and in developing the plans I looked at VTK as well as at the "at home" plans of several councils 

Requirements:

According to VTK, in this badge, girls discover that there's more to flowers than just good looks.  

• Uncover the science of one flower
• Look under the petals
• Find out how flowers help people
• Have fun with flowers
• Send a message in flower code

When girls have earned this badge, they'll know all that's wonderful about flowers.

Activity Choices

Uncover the science of one flower

Girl Scouts of Northeast Kansas and Southwest Missouri's plan for this badge had the girls looking a gardens online.  Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri send the girls on a flower hunt through the neighborhood.  I decided to have the girls hunt for flowers in the churchyard (there are some garden beds plus a big field)  We took pictures of the ones we found and ran them through the iNaturalist app to find out what they were and talked about how flowers made seeds.

VTK had the girls researching facts about flowers online, planting flowers, or talking to a botanist.  We may plant a flower next time.

Look Under the Petals

VTK  has the girls researching scented flowers, dying flowers or researching flower families.  We'll dye flowers next time.  

Find Out How Flowers Help People

VTK recommends researching how flowers turn into fruits, researching medicinal flowers or making bath beads.  My plan was to make bath beads, using the provided recipe.  It called for rose water, essential oil, mineral oil, borax, flour and powdered mild, along with food coloring.  I donated the flour and food coloring and spent over $30 on the rest of the stuff.  I planned to make these with my Brownies as part of My Best Self (things that help calm you) and with the Juniors for this badge.  The recipe said to mix everything up and roll it into beads; well I got a syrupy mess.  

I'll admit this ticked me off--and using the feedback form on VTK, I told GSUSA as much.  First, the ingredients were, in my opinion, way too expensive.  However, if the project had worked, I could have lived with that.  However, the cost of the rose water meant I only bought enough for the girls, not enough to try it myself first.  If I had pulled a random recipe from a random blog, shame on me for not trying it first.  However, I should be able to trust that activities I get from GSUSA work as advertised (no matter how many times I find that they do not).  

Have Fun With Flowers

VTK suggested making pressed flower bookmarks, a necklace from rose petals or a bouquet of tissue paper flowers.  We made tissue paper flowers.

Send a Message in Flower Code

VTK suggested making corsages, bouquets or flower arrangements.  I bought some dollar store artificial flowers and gave the girls some old mugs and let them arrange the flowers.  They came out nice.  Some girls added their tissue paper flowers to the mix.  

My Comments

We had fun with the crafts today and dyeing the flower will be fun next time.  I think I've seen where  you can do scented bath salts by adding dye and essential oils to Epsom Salts so we'll do that in place of the failed bath beads.