Good Afternoon,
A couple of weeks ago I tried my hand at my first Journey in a Day. It was quite the learning experience as a new troop leader, but I think over-all it went well. I found it difficult to find information beyond the "Making Friends" kit that many use, so I thought a blog post might help other troops out there who are looking into completing the Daisy journey "Three Cheers for Animals" in just one day.
To give you an idea of how I came to this schedule and activities, I'm going to explain the process I followed. I found it worked well for me and will probably do something similar in the future. First of all, I went ahead and bought the leader guide for the Three Cheers for Animals journey. I wanted to get an idea of what the requirements are, look for activity ideas and see what the traditional journey plan would look like. I decided early on that I didn't want the journey to have to much coloring. I had found that the kits available to purchase had mostly coloring and not enough movement. Not to diss coloring. I love to color. However, if I wanted a group of 6 and 7 year olds to be engaged for hours I didn't think coloring was going to do the trick.
I also decided early on that instead of focusing on domestic animals, I was going to focus my journey on local wildlife. This was actually a hard decision for me because my husband is a veterinarian, and I could have used him...I mean use his "expertise". However, after looking at badges to come in Brownies and Juniors, I decided there was going to be enough pet focused activities that it made sense to focus this journey to something different.
To get on my soapbox for a second, my personal mission with my troop is get them engaged in the outdoors as much as possible. My personal experience when I was a scout was when our troop was more engaged in outdoor activities and education, I got more out of the scouting experience. The results of my completely unscientific survey of all my friends who were Girl Scouts as kids was they all lost interest in scouting once they ended up in a troop that only did more home based activities. I had one friend that point blank that said as a little girl she was quite peeved when she learned what her male friends were doing in Boy Scouts compared to what she was doing in Girl Scouts. So, my personal mission is to give my girls a well rounded experience. Sure, we'll do crafts. Obviously, judging by the title of my blog, I love crafts. However, I think it's important to also give them exposure to the outdoors (and STEM and leadership for that matter). It's entirely possible some of these girls come from families that aren't able to offer those kind of experiences due to a multitude of factors. While I do camp, I'm still going to have to step out of my own comfort zone as well and learn some new skills to pass along. I think that's an important part of my journey as a scout leader. Just my two cents. Back to my planning process.
After I had a focus and did a preliminary read of the guide, I wrote down the different awards associated with the journey. In the Three Cheers for Animal Journey there is the Bird Bath Award, Red Robin Award and Tula Award. I then wrote down what the ultimate goal of each of these awards was. I read through the sample plans in the leader guide for each of these awards and noted what activities and stories I wanted to use in the journey.
Once I did that, I then looked to see where I needed to add more content/activities. I took into account that I didn't want the girls getting all hyped up with three high energy activities in a row. So I tried to balance activities that got the girls up and moving with more passive activities. I also wrote down what the goal for each activity was. I found this helpful when I needed to keep the girls on message.
I found this a fairly effective way to draft up my plan for the Journey. However, I knew from the start I was going to have trouble with timing. I have found through Girl Scout events and birthday parties, I don't really have any idea how long activities are going to take. It's hard to know with younger girls how long the attention span will hold before you need to shift direction. So, since every group of girls is different and you'll have to account for that, I would suggest having some back-up activities in case you speed through activities like we did. On the converse, maybe your group is really into one activity and wants to take more time on it. I would make note of what activities you can skip if you're running behind time wise.
One other note. we did have some Brownies that decided to join the Journey. Since they didn't need or had already earned the Daisy Journey badge, I looked through current Brownie badges. I didn't find a current badge that matched what we were doing. I could have done a fun badge instead, but I felt like the girls were doing a ton of work not to earn an official badge. So, I did a bit of research and found the requirements of the retired Brownie Animal Try-It badge. One little known fact is that girls can earn the retired badges and display them with their other official badges so long as they meet the badge requirements. Many local libraries and online libraries have the old badge requirement books. So, I tracked down two retired badges on eBay and ordered them for the Brownies.
Here is the schedule we followed:
Session One
Discover – Bird Bath Award
12:00-12:15 Check-In
Game:
Animal Guessing (pg. 9 of leader guide)
Goal: Allows
girls to discover local wildlife through acting and movement
Supplies:
Notecards and hat or sack
Preparation: Print pictures of local wildlife and paste on notecards.
Directions: Put notecards in a sack/hat. Girls take turns giving hints
about the animal and the other girls try to guess what the animal is.
12:15-12:20– Girl Scout Promise
Welcome girls to the journey. Explain that a journey is a trip. We’re
going to take a journey where we learn about local wildlife/animals, how to
take care of them then teach other people how to take care of wildlife. We’re
going to finish up our journey will making some things to help care for
wildlife in area.
12:20-12:40 – Speaker:
Local Wildlife Expert
Goal: Give girls an overview of how taking care of our environment
helps take care of local wildlife and also ourselves.
Preparation: Line up speaker
12:40-1:00 – Discussion:
Decision Making Scenarios (pg. 48 of leader guide)
Goal: Girls take the information they have received from the guest
speaker and the animal guessing game to make good choices to care for local
wildlife.
Supplies: Notecards
Preparation: Create scenarios and put on notecards
Directions: Read the scenarios and girls give answers on what they
would do.
1:00-1:45— Snack & Red Robin Story (pg. 17 of
journey book)
Meal: Sunshine
in a Bag or Bird Nests
Preparation: Purchase food
Directions: Read Red Robin story during snack
2:00-2:20— Game:
Fly Fly Away (pg. 47 of leader guide)
Goal: Through movement and discussion focus on how each girl is unique
just like each animal.
Supplies: Streamers, iPhone, Speaker
Preparation: Playlist on phone
Directions: Each girl takes 3 streamers in each hand as their “wings,”
Play music while each girl tries to fly around. Call out other birds to have
girls act them out (Penguin, Hummingbird, blue bird, eagle, pheasant, ostrich,
goose, and Flamingo). After dancing, have girls sit down to rest and have a
discussion about what makes each bird special and what makes them special. Ask
how they learned/got that characteristic that made them special.
Session Two
Connect – Red Robin Award
2:20-3:00— Discussion: Wildlife Video
Goal: Girls learn about how wildlife take care of themselves and what
we can do to help them.
Supplies: TV Screen or Projector
Preparation: You Tube Playlist
3:00-3:20— Activity:
Animal Care Books
Goal: Girls create books to share with community how to help local
wildlife. Allow girls to lead the discussion on where to donate the finished
books.
Supplies: Printer paper, crayons, pens
Preparation: Pre-print
Session Three
Take Action – Tula Award
3:35-4:00-- Activity:
Bird Nesting Material Hanger
Goal: Girls create a hanging basket with bird nesting materials to take
home and help birds in their own community
Supplies: Yarn pieces, leaves, twigs, dry grass, pine needles, Whisks
Preparation: Gather supplies
Directions: To read: "Most birds build some kind of structure to contain their
eggs and nestlings. A bird’s nest may be as simple as a nighthawk’s or Killdeer’s
depression on the ground, a hole in a tree excavated by a woodpecker, or an
elaborate pouchlike nest woven by an oriole. The most familiar nest type is a
cup made of vegetation and sometimes mud. Often, the outer layers are of coarse
material, and the inside is lined with softer or finer material. Depending on
the species, cup-nesters may hide their nests in trees or shrubs, build them on
the ground, or place them in nest boxes or tree cavities. Fallen leaves and
twigs left unraked make excellent nest materials for many birds. Providing
nooks in your backyard where this untidy debris can collect provides a variety
of material for the birds to check out when they are building nests. They may
even pick through your compost pile looking for suitable nest material. You can
also put out concentrated stashes of nest material. If your yard has safe nest
sites and adequate construction material, it will be more attractive to birds,
including those that don’t visit feeders. Where would you put the nesting
material hanger?" (Source: Cornell Department of Orthnology)
Explain how we’re going to use the whisks to pack with nest
stuff and how they can hang it up at home in a tree.
4:00-4:45-- Activity:
Make Bat Boxes
Goal: Girls work as a team to make a bat box for local bats. Discussion
on why bat boxes are needed and relate it to the needs of each girls.
Supplies: Wood, nails, wood glue, saw, router, black paint, hammers,
white paint
Preparation: Precut wood, predrill all nail holes
Directions: See handout
4:45-5:00— Clean up and Friendship Circle
Bird Bath Award
The first activity we did was the Animal Guessing Game. It's a pretty basic concept. You have pictures of local wildlife, and the girls have to act out the animal while the other girls guess. Some local wildlife is easy to guess like rabbits or skunks, but surprisingly, the girls even got some of the harder ones like badgers and weasels. I found a great handout from the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks which had a list of all types of local wildlife. I found corresponding pictures and printed them out. I would recommend pictures over names since some girls probably aren't the strongest readers yet or a picture is easier for them to identify. Once the girls guessed the animal I read a couple of facts from the handout I found.
After this activity, we had a professor from our local university come and speak about how to take care of local wildlife. She spoke about maintaining habitat and sustainable practices. She was really great with the girls, and they seemed genuinely interested.
I took notes during her speech and came up with some quick scenerios to ask the girls to give solutions on.
We had a quick snack while I read the story about the red robin and flower garden flowers telling how they got their colors. After the story we did the Fly, Fly Away game found in the leader manual. This was a favorite in the group probably because it involved moving and music.
Red Robin Award
The first part of this session was a video playlist on YouTube that covered local wildlife. I thought this would be a nice reprieve
from all the activity, but to my surprise this was the least popular portion of the journey. If I were to do this again, I would either just do a quick 3 minute or so video with an activity mixed in or just cut it all together. To see my You Tube playlist, click here. (Note: we only watched the first 5 minutes or so of the last video)
After we watched these videos, the girls had to take what they learned on the videos to make one page of a book. The book was supposed to inform the reader about local wildlife. I found a printable book page where there's a portion for a drawing at the top and then a lined book page at the bottom. There was a small amount of discussion about where we should donate the book for people to read. Eventually it was decided that we would donate the book to the local doctor's office for kids to read. After the journey I compiled all the pages into a book, laminated it, added a cover and donated it to our local doctor's office for other children to enjoy in the exam rooms.
Tula Award
We did watch one video regarding how birds make nests which helped us with our next activity. The girls made nesting material hangers. I did a bit of research on these before we made them. I've seen them all over Pinterest, and I wanted to make sure they were actually safe for bird before we made them. The Cornell website was very helpful with what is good to put into the nesting material hangers. Dryer lint is a no go. It dissolves in the rain and therefore harms nests instead of helping them. It's no shock that natural materials are better. I did use a bit of yarn (that was a mixed recommendation on several different websites I visited). I made sure each piece of yarn was cut very short..less than 2 inches to keep it from tangling in the feet of birds. Rather than use suet cages (which can get expensive for a large group), we used dollar store whisks. They actually worked pretty well once the girls got the hang of how to pack everything in. This was one item the girls got to take home with them.
The final activity was the big one and probably took up the most prep time. The girls got into teams of two or three and made bat boxes. Instead of bog this post down with all the details of how to make them, I did a separate blog post. You can check that out
here. I pre-drilled all the holes so the girls could build them easier. The girls had a blast hammering at them. Prior to handing out hammers, I did remind each girl about how to properly hammer, and all the girls did a great job with small taps on the nail head. I had several small person hammers (how I have five of them I do not know) so they didn't have to worry about the weight or the huge claw on one end. After the Journey, I did take their boxes home and give them a bit of TLC before donating them to a local nature park.
Since we were running about an hour ahead of schedule, we took the opportunity to get outside and do some geocaching. We held our journey at a great local resource, a large nature park. I was actually surprised by how much the girls loved it. My own daughter has asked to go several times since.
That's the story of how we put the entire Daisy Three Cheers for Animals journey in one (long) day!
