With the impending release of the new Girl's Guide to Girl Scouting, I had been having a hard time finding resources for leaders trying to plan the 2011-2012 school year. They have just released a catalog showing us what the books will look like, how they will generally work, what the new badges will look like, and not a whole lot else.
Last year by this time, I had the first 6 months of meetings planned, along with field trips and which Try-Its my Brownie Troop would be working towards. Because I had all the information I needed. This year I feel kind of lost. I am betting other leaders feel the same way, those of us who will be diving into the new badge system this year, and not next.
So what do we do?
The only answer I can come up with is the answer GSUSA wants us to use: the Journeys. It is pretty obvious by now that the Journeys were not meant to be an "addition" to the core books, but the cornerstone of the new core books. Everything has been redesigned to center around the Journey books from the new handbooks to the badges to the leadership awards.
As the release date of the Girl's Guide to Girl Scouting seems to get pushed further and further away, the only thing I can do to plan my year is work through the Journeys. My troop voted to start with aMuse (I have a troop of very extroverted melodramatic young ladies, so this didn't really surprise me!). I don't really like the format, personally, because there is NO WAY my troop of 15 loud and highly curious girls can get through a single session in the hour and a half we have, much less the 1 hour usually recommended for troop meetings. But we will give it a try.
And because my girls and I all love SWAPs, I am going to try to incorporate SWAPs into each session. If you are also doing the aMuse Junior Journey book, please feel free to give me some input as to how your troop is doing and what special events or activities you have planned. I will try to post my thoughts on Wednesdays, after our meetings.
I will also be posting special SWAP "recipe cards" each week on Saturdays. These are going to be fun little printables that you can use for your troop. Some will be oldies but goodies, but most will be things I came up or redesigned to coordinate with a given book or theme. First will be SWAPs for the aMuse journey book, and then I will begin on SWAPs for the Journey books we used as Brownies: the Brownie Quest and Wonders of Water.
