Convention was AWESOME!

Wow.  What a week! I didn't end up getting to listen in on the Board Governance session at GSU while I was volunteering as a teacher's aide.  There was a miscommunication back in the planning stages, and GSUSA didn't realize our Council was going to be supplying volunteers  for that, so they brought their own.  :( But, I certainly didn't get sent home!  Instead I was directing traffic, stuffing tote bags (I did a lot of that), and then acting as a bodyguard - for the bags!  On another shift, I acted as a bodyguard for food and books.  There was a lot of guarding and bag stuffing for me. ;)

I got to work a shift with our Council's camp Rangers and the Salt Lake City team, along with staff members from the National office, and local troop leaders.  Since we were just stuffing tote bags, we did a lot of chatting and having fun.  I really enjoyed it, and enjoyed watching the George R. Brown being transformed from the Quilt Festival to the GS Convention.

Then it was time to actually go visit the Hall of Exhibits with my daughter, as a sneak peek for our troop's visit.  I am SO glad I went.  The GS Shop Megastore had ALL of the skill building activity sets for sale!  So I was able to grab all of the Junior sets.

My Girl's Guide is now packed full, seriously full.  With all three sets of skill builder packs, I can barely turn the pages.  This makes me glad that each badge has its own little packet of information.  Once we have finished a badge, I can remove it from the Guide binder.  I finally feel like I can start planning the rest of the year.

Now, what badge to work on when we go camping at the beach? . . . 

Got my Girl's Guide!

Well, we got the first batch of the new handbooks for our troop this week.  Our Council wasn't sure how many to order, so they just started ordering as soon as they were allowed and kept ordering every time National offered them, starting back in the Spring.  So our books are coming in waves, and we just finished the second wave.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the very first order I made was for 2 Brownie Handbooks. Gahhhh . . . Luckily, I made my second order for 5 books almost immediately after that.  I will have to wait until the last shipment for the rest of the books for my troop.

So, first impressions (second actually): They look really empty without the additional modules in them. But, I do like the modular concept.  I don't like the art, and I don't like all the purple, but I'm not really the target audience. :)  The art is similar to the art in the Journey books, and they are brought up all over the place in the Handbook.  For those of you who are hoping the Journeys are simply a phase, I think these books are a pretty definitive "no" to that.

First impressions from my daughter: She liked it.  She loved the stickers in the back and immediately wanted to stick them everywhere.  I couldn't see whether they were "supposed" to be used for something in particular, but I stopped her anyway.  Just in case. :)  I do like the fact that the first thing she commented on after looking through it and reading through some of the awards was, "I wanna be a Junior Aide".  She explained the steps, and told me she wanted to do this because she enjoyed working with little kids.  She came up with several different ideas on how to help out at a Daisy meeting, and asked if I would help her get in contact with a Daisy Troop.  

This is exactly what I want to start seeing during the Junior years - my girls start initiating projects that are actually doable for them.  They have such good hearts and high expectations of themselves that they think they can cure cancer, save the whales, and stop water waste all before dinnertime. :)  I would like to see them thinking more critically of themselves, not in a negative way ("I can't do that!") but in a realistic way ("I don't think I can do this by myself, or even with the help of my troop, but maybe we can talk to some adults in our community to find a way . . .").  It seems like a hard task, helping girls to grow into good strong women.  You want them to strive, to try, to reach for the stars.  You don't want to tell them a task is impossible, even when it is.  

You even want them to fail.  

At least I do.  I want my girls to learn that failing doesn't make you a failure.  It means you have another chance at completing the task, but that you need to come up with a different strategy.  It astonished me when I heard a Leader talk about NOT wanting to let her troop have a chance at failing.  Nobody learns from being successful all the time.  Failing is not a problem.  Having the wrong attitude about failing is a problem.

Training

Check out all the SWAPs I got! :)

Last weekend, I got to go to Girl Scout Training! ^.^ Now in my Council, they firmly believe that no Leader should walk into a situation feeling unprepared. We have trainings for EVERYTHING. We train you to be a Leader, to be a First Aider, to be a Troop Camper, to be a hiker, to be an archer, to ride horses, to sail ships, to sell cookies, to do arts and crafts, to sing songs, to cook over a fire, to cook when you can't light a fire. We even have training to train you how to train people!

I have talked to guys who volunteer with the local Boy Scout Troop and had to pick my jaw up off the floor when I heard that they don't really do training. Unless they want to go camping. Or become the head Scoutmaster. O.O

Yeah, that's not our way. Sometimes, the training is just stuff that NEEDS to get done. You NEED to know which forms you must have filled out every year by your troop's parents. You NEED to know how to run a meeting. You NEED to know different ways to try to build a young girl's confidence. You NEED to know what a SWAP is. :) Well, you do if you are in Girl Scouts for very long. . .

But then there's the fun trainings. This was what I did last weekend. I and 250 of my fellow Girl Scout Leaders and Volunteers met up at our Council's best camp and spent the weekend pretending we were girls. We didn't have to organize the activities, or come up with the crafts, and plan the meals, or even COOK the meals. I had a camp kaper to do, sang songs, and performed skits with my new friends around a fluttery fabric "campfire". I got to sleep in one of the tall cabin "treehouses" so coveted in our Council, and got swayed to sleep in the most perfect camping weather I have ever experienced.

And I got overloaded with information. It will take me months to digest all that I learned, and I only took about 10% of the trainings offered! I took trainings geared towards my troop's level: Bronze Award information, Field Trips, Extended Troop Travel, Geacaching (more on this next week), and a fun Texas-themed arts and crafts session.

I think that the information I gained is almost as important as the feeling of community I shared with all of these women (and 2 men).  I spent the weekend feeling like I was included in everything, like I was among friends.  It didn't matter that I had never met any of these people before in my life.  We were Girl Scouts.

I can't wait for the National Convention! :)

I got to touch them!

The new Girl's Guides, that is. I had my SUFPM training this past weekend, and they had copies of all of the new books to look through. They looked huge, to me, and half empty. But they do seem to have everything in one place (as opposed to having a handbook and a badgebook and a bronze award guide and prints of stuff off the internet, etc., etc.). I went ahead and pre-ordered mine and my daughter's, which means I will get them sometime in November. Maybe.

It was very frustrating to be told that there will be a whole new set of books, that will become the GSUSA standard at the end of this coming schoolyear, and then be told it won't be available until September. As I have mentioned before, I like planning out my school year during the summer. So that I don't feel like I am scrambling to get prepared the weekend or day before a meeting.

It is becoming even more frustrating to be told, "well, I know we said it would be available in September, but really, honestly, you'll be lucky if you get it by Christmas. And we're not even going to really tell you when you can expect to get it."

No word yet of whether the badges will be embroidered or printed. I prefer sewing the printed ones, but I prefer the look of the embroidered ones - by a large amount. I think based on the price, they are likely to be printed and iron-on.

Incidentally, the old books:

Handbook $10.95

Badgebook $11.95

Adult Book $6

89 Junior Badges @ $0.95 each

Girl's Guide:

Binder $22.50 ($16.87 if you pre-order)

extra badge modules $12 (all 3)

26 Junior Badges @ $1.50 each

Planning the 2011-2012 Scout Year

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.