Review of the Daisy Flower Garden Journey

I can say without a doubt that the worst GSUSA programming I ever tried to do "by the book" was the Daisy Welcome to the Flower Garden Journey. While I had led my older daughter's troop through Brownies and Juniors, I had never been a Daisy leader.  While I had a lot of non-Girl Scout experience with 7-9 year olds, I had never worked with kindergartners.  When my younger daughter became a Daisy, it was the first year of the two year Daisy program and I knew I had to do more than the petals over those two years, so when the nice lady at our council shop told me to buy the new program, I took it.

I no longer have those books (good riddance) but I remember reading through them and thinking that the stories were too long, too convoluted and had too many similar characters.  I wasn't real impressed with the activities, but figured maybe that was because I wasn't used to dealing with kids who were that young.  

At each meeting, according to the plan given in the leader's manual, you would read part of this story to the girls.  You would then do some activities, none of which particularly impressed me.  Finally you would do a project, and three options were given:  raise ladybugs, raise worms or plant a garden.  The kicker was that the project was supposed to be done for someone or some organization and was supposed to be sustainable--in other words you were supposed to find someone to keep it up after you were done.