Sunday, February 25, 2024

Survey Results: Junior Journeys and TAPs


 This is one in a series of posts about a survey I did of members of a number of Facebook groups for Girl Scout leaders.  The other posts published to date are:


While I have other posts summarizing the data as a whole, this post is looking at what they said about Junior  Journeys and TAPs--Take Action Projects.  While the What I Ordered...post more fully described those who responded, in general I'd say the people who did had a higher than average involvement in and commitment to Girl Scouting. 

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Silver on the Horizon: An Interview With a Troop Leader


 I recently spoke to Sarah about her troop's experience with the Bronze Award and published this post about it.   We also talked about how the girls in her troop grew through their experience with the Bronze award.

This post is taken from the same  conversation. As with my other interview posts, I spoke to Sarah and recorded the conversation.  I then formatted the post as a Q & A, using her words for the answers, but composing the questions while writing the post.  

Friday, February 9, 2024

Badge Insert or VTK?

 


The basic steps for Girl Scout badges are freely available on Badge Explorer, but those short steps don't really tell you much about what GSUSA has in mind for the badge.  To dig more deeply, you have to go to VTK (Volunteer Toolkit) or you have to buy the badge inserts from GSUSA.  The bones of today's program came out when my college sophomore was a kindergarten Daisy.  However, a lot of parts have been added since then.  While there are a lot of copies of the Girls Guide to Girl Scouting and the badge inserts from it floating around, there are also a lot of badges and Journeys which have come out since then and are not part of the binder (unless the previous owner downloaded them and added them).  40/64 Brownie Awards are new since the GGGS came out.  That leads to the question:  "Do I buy the badge insert or do I just use VTK?  Is there a difference?"  This post will try to answer that question by looking at and comparing the badge insert for Brownie Art and Design with VTK.  You can read this post about VTK's plans. 

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Growth Through the Bronze Award


This is the second post regarding my interview with Sarah about the Bronze Award. In the first post we talked about her troop's Bronze Award project.

This post is going to focus on the growth the girls experienced because of the Bronze Award.
Q: How would you say working on the Bronze Award has helped your daughter?