New Badge Review: Brownie Design With Nature

 

The third badge in the Math in Nature series is Design With Nature. This post takes a look at the Brownie Version.  According to Badge Explorer, girl will use math to do things in the natural world, like find the age of natural objects, build a honeycomb, design a bird feeder, and go bird-watching.

The five short requirements are:

1. Calculate the age of a natural object

2. Explore the shape of beehives

3. Measure and build a bird feeder

4. Use ratios to make bird food

5. Graph data about birds

When you've earned this badge, you will know about natural objects.  You’ll know how to measure, use scale and ratio, and make a graph.

Camping Survey Results: Part 2 Girl Scout Camp Facilities

When most people think of Girl Scouts they think of camping and cookies.  As adult members of Girl Scouts we know that cookies support our camps--and those my age can remember selling cookies to buy a camp.  Unfortunately, today many councils are selling one or more of their camps, often with promises to use the money to improve the remaining camps.  

Survey Results: Ambassador Badges

Were you wondering if I was ever going to get to Ambassadors?  For those who are not following along, this is the fourth in a series of posts recounting the results of a survey about Girl Scouts' older girl program.  Here are the other posts:  

• General responses about the program
• Cadette Badges
• Senior Badges

This post will cover the responses about Ambassador badges.  I'll put my usual disclaimer in here:  I'm not a professional survey designer and the Facebook groups I poll are almost certainly not a random sampling of Girl Scouts or Girl Scout leaders.  I don't claim these results would hold up if a professional wrote a randomly delivered survey. I just noticed that the Think Like a Journeys were left off my award list, so I don't know how popular they are with this age group. Do you? 

New Badge Review: Junior Design With Nature

 

The third Math in Nature badge introduced this year is called "Design With Nature". Here is what Badge Explorer gives as the requirements:

Juniors use math to plan and organize an outdoor adventure. They'll decide where to go, how long they'll be gone for, and what to bring.

        Steps

            1. Find your hiking pace

            2. Choose a hiking trail

            3. Find changes in elevation on a map

            4. Decide how much food to bring

            5. Pack for your adventure

        Purpose

When Juniors have earned this badge, they'll know about different types of maps. They'll know how to calculate distance, pace, elevation changes, and area.

Camping Survey Results Part 1: Who Answered, The Importance of Camps and Have Camps Closed?

I recently ran a survey, which I publicized on several Facebook groups for Girl Scout leaders, about Girl Scout Camps and camping.  The reason this topic came to my mind is that the camp closing bug hit my council this year. One of our three camps was closed and sold.    

Besides selling the camp, our council is selling the office buildings that were headquarters for the two legacy councils and plans to get space in a high profile retail space, I'm guessing right off the interstate between the two major cities. They plan a capital campaign to improve the remaining camps and, I guess to create this new space.

Think Like An Engineer

 My Brownies and Juniors are working on Think Like an Engineer.  I'm not sure yet if we will finish it with a TAP or not, but the girls like to make stuff and I wanted something I could do with both groups.  I summarized the VTK plans in a prior post, but this is the first time I've led this Journey. 

I started with reading them a story about engineer Temple Grandin, which talked about engineers as  problem solvers.  The I  reviewed the design process with them.  I had decided to start with the Junior newspaper structure from meeting 1 because I thought the mess would be minimal and we were meeting at the library as our normal meeting area was out of commission due to Hurricane Ida.  

New Badge Review: Junior Numbers In Nature

This year GSUSA came out with a new set of progressive badges, Math in Nature for Daisies, Brownies and Juniors.  I've taken a look at Brownie Shapes in Nature, Brownie Numbers in Nature and Junior Shapes in Nature.  This post will review Junior Numbers in Nature.  

Survey Results: Senior Badges

 

This is the third post I've written to share the results of my survey on the older girl program in Girl Scouts.  You can read general impressions here, and opinions about Cadette badges here. 

I asked respondents to review the list of awards available to Seniors and to give them one of these ratings:

• Haven't done it and don't want to
• Did it, liked it
• Did it, meh
• Did it, didn't like it
• Haven't done it but want to
• Didn't know it existed.

I had 248 overall responses to the survey and each badge got about 90 votes, so evidently most people who responded had not led Seniors or been one under the current program.  

I went through the responses looking for outliers---those badges which got responses  that stood out from the others.