Junior Digital Photography and Outdoor Art

My troop is Brownies and Junior and for reasons of no interest to any of you, we have one fifth grade Junior, eight fourth grade Juniors and six second grade Brownies. If you review this blog you'll see that for the last two years I've run joint meetings for Daisies and Brownies, relating Daisy petals to what the Brownies were doing.  It worked well, but resulted in a very leader-directed group.  While I polled the girls about the badges they wanted to do, in order to make things work for both groups, I was the one making most of the decisions. 

I wanted to change that this year, however, I didn't want to commit myself to running two troops   The compromise I reached, in part due to my desire to meet outside due to Covid, was to continue to have one joint meeting per month on the same night when we have always met, and one meeting per month on Saturday morning when I split the troop and meet with the Brownies at 10 and the Juniors at 11:15.  My goal is to make the Saturday mornings much more girl-led. 

Outdoor Art, Part 2

 When I asked the girls what they wanted to do this year, "anything with art" was a typical answer.  I have Brownies and Juniors and one art badge for both levels was Outdoor Art, so that's what we started.  You can read about our first meeting here. 

This week we did two projects.  I counted them both toward requirement 5 for the Juniors--Design with nature, and for the Brownies, the wind chimes met requirement 3 and the luminaries, requirement 5.  The Juniors still have to do requirement 1, and one of my moms who is a photographer is going to be my artist expert at our next meeting, which will be Juniors only.  She's  going to cover outdoor art, talking about outdoor photography and she's going to cover cameras as part of Digital Photographer, which will be our next Junior badge.  

The girls had a ball with our projects tonight and I was really happy with the way they looked when we finished.  We got a little knot tying practice and, as one girl noted, what we did with buttons was a lot like sewing.

In-Person Meeting: Outdoor Art

We had our first in-person meeting in over six months last night.  It was so good to see the girls!  In person is much more fun than Zoom, at least for the leader (and I'm pretty sure for the girls too).  We met outside, under a patio next to the youth building at my church (we are usually inside the building).  I put four girls at a banquet or  picnic table.

Outdoor Art Day

In my not so humble opinion, one of the major things that separates Girl Scouts from other youth activities aimed at girls is its outdoor program.  Because of that, as a leader I try to offer outdoor-focused programming several times a year.

During this troop year we attended our Service Unit camping trip, had two daytrips to our local Girl Scout camp and we had an Outdoor Art day at a nearby state park. Our Daisies earned their Outdoor Art Maker badge and the Brownies earned. Outdoor Art Creator.