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Brownie Shapes in Nature
The first step for the Brownie badge is "Track Natural Objects" and it too is about observation, categorization and recording data via tally marks. "Graph Natural Objects" is all about graphing. "Make a Spiderweb with Symmetry is about learning the concepts of symmetry, orbs and radials. "Explore Tessellations" is about recognizing tessellations. "Collect Data About Birds" is about observing birds and recording data in a data table.
72% of those who responded said that it was necessary to discuss categories for "Track Natural Objects", but 28% said it was not. 60% said it was not necessary to record data with tally marks. 11% said each girl needs to do a graph, 77% said that the group could work on a graph together and 11% said a graph was not necessary to meet the overall purpose of the badge.
47% replied that a spiderweb craft was necessary for "Make a Spiderweb With Symmetry" and 79% said you had to use the words "radial", "orb" and "symmetry".
I was curious if I was the only person who had never heard of tessellations, so I asked. 55% said they knew what the word meant, 22 knew it because of the badge and 22% did not. 84% thought it was necessary to teach the girls the meaning to earn this badge.
70% believed that observing birds and entering data on a data table was needed to earn the badge.
Activities people did for this badge that were not from GSUSA plans were
- We did a teachers pay teachers activity building a beehive of kindness, we made a human spider web
- Week long Day camp achieved one of the math in nature badges, and we did spirit of the badge requirements for the other 2 in brownie series
- We did it on a nature walk. Each girl was responsible to tally only one thing, so they all had a clipboard, some said birds, some said spiderwebs, etc. for the graph, it would be boring to do in paper so we took math links to the park and each just did a linear graph with math links of the item they were responsible to tally on the walk and they showed each other and talked about the things we saw most.
- For the spiderweb we didn’t do a craft, we did a big spiderweb with twine where all the girls were holding one end. We did the radial and talked about the word symmetry.
- For tessalation we had shape stamps so they could create a pattern that fits together.
- For birds we would need to spend hours birdwatching to be able to graph them and we are not vir experts só we observed them during the nature walk and did tally them so we knew how many we saw but we couldn’t identify most of them, but we brought a book about common birds in our state and looked at it and talked about the birds we have seen or could see in our area.
- Nature rubbing
- I felt that observing birds was not age appropriate. Birds move way too fast (I am a birdwatcher). We did this at the zoo watching other animals.
- We made a tesselation placemat for the fourth step. For the second step, we used natural objects to make a bar graph outside as a troop (sticks formed the bottom line), got a picture, then took graph apart and put it back in nature. For the third step, we made “spiderwebs”, which I’d always called Gods Eyes as a craft, and the girls really enjoyed it. This badge was a favorite honestly, except for the random collecting data about birds. That seemed thrown in there randomly.
- Also played games relating to activities.
- Instead of a spider craft we made god’s eyes and talked about how variations in the sticks and yarn impacted them
- we tweaked- we made one big spider web together using trees as the poles and having girls take turns being the spider. Not a craft, but thinking about how our bodies move to make a radial shape, and then played a body mirror game to talk about symmetry.
- Observed birds but just made one shared chart and talked about other places they've visited and what kinds of birds they have seen that weren't on our chart. And why do we see so many cardinals and chickadees in Ohio winter, but no finches, or pelicans etc.?
- For Brownies and Juniors, we watched a clip from “Donald in Mathemagic Land”, instead of/in addition to some of the other activities.
- We did additional spider web activity instead
- Tracked birds we saw on a YouTube video (we did this meeting virtually during Covid)
- We did most of these while camping and went on a quiet hike
35 people had this badge available when the girls were Brownies but chose not to do it. 2 already had a full schedule when the badge came out. 10 looked at the plans and did not want to do it. 6 talked to their girls, who did not want to do it. 17 just chose other things.
Of the 29 who did the badge, 5 said their girls enjoyed it and the VTK plans were good. 21 said the girls enjoyed it because of leader-made plans. 2 said the VTK plans were not fun and 1 had girls who did not enjoy her plans.
79% of those who responded said the badge was appropriate for Brownies.
Brownie Design With Nature
"Calculate the Age of Natural Objects" is the first step for this badge and all the VTK choices involve doing some math calculations, so I think the calculation is the focus. I did not ask any questions about the first step, because I was trying to limit the length of the post.
Regarding "Explore the Shape of Beehives" 63% of those who responded said it was necessary to discuss the concept of scale, as two of the three VTK choices did. The third VTK choice involved a complex multi-step math problem to calculate the number of bees it took to make the honey in a beehive. 75% of people, including me, did not think this was an appropriate activity for Brownies.
For "Measure and Build a Bird Feeder", the VTK plans offer three types of bird feeders and the talking points have the girls computing the volume of the bird feeder. 52.5% of people did not believe computing the volume of the bird feeder was necessary to earn the badge.
In "Use Ratios to Make Bird Food" girls make food for their feeder. They use the volume figure they have calculated to use ratios to scale the recipe for the food to the size of the feeder. 33% of those who replied said that it was not necessary for girls to compute the ratios to scale the recipe.
"Graph Data About Birds" offers three different activities that involved gathering data about birds. There was also the option to use VTK-supplied data. The thing all the choices had in common was drawing a bar graph. Only 4% of those who responded said that no graph was necessary. 87% said that the group could collaborate and create one graph.
57% of those who answered said that the Brownie Design With Nature badge, as I describe it, was NOT appropriate for Brownies.
Of those who did the badge, 81% said they created a plan they knew the girls would like, 6.3% (1 person) said the VTK plans were good and 12.6% said the VTK plans did not work well.
Other activities people did for this badge, or comments they left:
- We did not do this one
- 1 was Day camp badge and other 2 were spirit of the badge
- I got a tree cookie so they could count the lines to know how old it is, first they just guessed then counted. They got a chance to taste honeycomb, they made a drawing of honeycomb using one acrylic piece of a hexagon and enjoyed adding details to it like bees and other things they created. I wasn’t planning on giving them time to add details but they started and liked it so I let them do it. We made a pinecone bird feeder using peanut butter and seeds so we just measured the pinecone height and width and the length of the twine we tied to the pinecone to hand it outside. For the birds, I printed some birds and bird food (found info online of some preferred seeds certain birds like). Girls picked their favorite bird and o told them witch seeds their bird likes, then I asked them to create a recipe of how many cups of each seed they wanted to put on their bird feeder according to the preference of the bird they chose. This was a hypothetical thing, we didn’t actually mixed their recipe because it would cost too much so we just bought a pre mixed bag of bird seed to give them for their bird feeder, but they enjoyed creating the recipe and writing down how for example that they wanted 1 cup of sunflower seed because it’s a big seed but they would put 3 cups of millet because that’s small and would work for the bird feeder. We didn’t do bird watching to be able to graph data, they are not interested in this activity and we don’t have any bird expert in our group, but we did learn about birds and bird food during this activity.
- My daughter and I did this independently. We made bird food suet cakes and had to figure out ratios of how much bird feed to use per jello packet and how much water to use. Graphing the data over the course of a week was a pain though, and who’s to say squirrels weren’t eating the suet cake instead of the birds!
- I can't remember as we did this in 2021 when the badges were released; I was very excited about the badges but they were tough. Unbelievably difficult and hard to understand the concepts as laid out in VTK
- na
- some of these choices were hard- I didn't make the girls calculate the math on their own, but I did model me doing the calculations and made some of the concepts simpler for them to figure out more intuitively- so I didn't have them calculate the multiplication of scale (here that is a late 3rd grade school skill) but I did show 1/3 cup, 1 cup, and 3 cup measuring containers to talk about it and asked questions about the multiplication and using the key terms like ratio and scale without making them do the calculations. They were easily able to engage in the math with representational objects
- We made a bee hotel
- Looked at beehives and saw bees in action
- We simplified in order to accommodate for avries levels of math comprehension
- VTK plans are horrible, we did our own thing including trying of 3rd party kits. This badge series in general is bad
My Comments
Well, I wasn't surprised that people considered the Design in Nature badge to be inappropriate for Brownies. I just have to wonder what made GSUSA believe it was.
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