Today we continue on with the Daisy 5 Flowers, 4 Stories, 3 Animals Journey, and we will finish it! I've combined meeting plans for the fourth and fifth meetings because the fourth meeting was our animal field trip to a local farm. Your field trip could be something totally different. I know that my Girl Scouts council offers an event every winter that counts toward the girls earning the "field trip" part of this Journey badge. Perhaps your council has something similar - and then there would be less for you to plan!
We took a field trip to a local dairy farm. The girls learned about cows and goats, and got to pet and help feed them. It was very interesting, despite a torrential downpour that made things pretty wet and muddy.
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| meeting a cow |
And now we come to the hardest meeting to plan. According to the Volunteer Toolkit (VTK), the girls are supposed to put on a performance for family members. This requires rehearsal time, which was like a whole separate meeting. At this point on our Journey, the school year had already started. So we were holding this meeting during our regularly scheduled meeting time.
Something else that turned me off from this part of the Journey was that it expected all girls to be comfortable speaking AND able to read. My troop had just started first grade when we held this meeting, and not all of the girls were on the same level.
Meeting Plan 5:
Pandas
To start this meeting, we reviewed all the animals we'd learned about: bald eagle, lion, cheetah. And then I added in fun facts about pandas. Instead of drawing a picture of a panda for our Team Animal Mural, the girls had to write a word that described pandas on the mural.
Assign Fun Facts
The next step was to present fun facts about these animals. Because we had four animals and four girls, it made it easy to divide up the fun facts. I wrote the names of the four animals on four pieces of paper, placed the papers into the birdbath we made, and the girls got to reach into the birdbath to pick one of the pieces of paper.
In order to come up with the fun facts, I put the girls' memories to the test. What did they remember about each animal? I had to help them out a bit, but we got there in the end. So that the girls wouldn't have to memorize their fun fact, I wrote it down on an index card.
Animal Masks
To make the presentation more fun, the girls decorated animal masks to wear. I purchased a pack of DIY animal masks from Michael's for the girls to put together. The masks didn't match all four of our animals, but it didn't matter.
Presentation
Then, to do the presentation, I hung the Team Animal Mural on the whiteboard (our meeting was held in a classroom at our school), and the moms in attendance were our audience. I recorded the performance and shared it with the moms so that they could show it to other family members.
All together, the girls said, "We are Troop 98475, and we learned about animals!" Then each girl took her turn reading her animal's fun fact from her notecard.
To close out the meeting, I asked the girls what their favorite animal was and how it makes them feel to take care of animals.
And that was finally the end of this Journey. We haven't done another Journey since, but I do know of places that offer Journey in a Day experiences. If someone else leads it, then I think I would do another one.
How do you feel about Journeys? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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