Here's a few photos from the very successful march at today's Boxborough Memorial Day parade. The girls did a great job! A beautiful day for a walk.

Not Your Cookie-Cutter Daisies

This entry, about our last meeting on May 3, was written by co-leader Kirsty Kerin.

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This year we started our Girl Scout Journey curriculum program called “Between the Earth and Sky.” On the surface, the Journey looks like a cute story and project work around the Daisy characters. However, the actual goal of the Journey is to focus the girls’ attention on their own feelings and skills, verbalize these comfortably and confidently, take into account the feelings and skills of those around them, then move on to engage their larger community and teach and share their skills. 

We have been working on our own feelings for several meetings. This week we began the transition to discuss the feelings of others. The girls each had one 8-inch cardboard cutout of a Daisy Scout. Each girl secretly thought of an emotion to draw on their Daisy’s face. When complete, they took it in turns to stand up, show their cutout to the group, and choose Daisy friends to guess which emotion they had drawn. The only one we couldn’t finally guess was “bonkers.” 

We discussed how difficult it is to guess what another person is feeling by just looking at their face or listening  for clues. We tried out lots of different emotional facial expressions (see the wonderful photos). We discussed how important it is to ask the other person direct questions and to listen to them when they answer. The troop had to resolve two conflicts during the meeting and we used our new term “Circle up!” to sit in a circle together and ask questions about what happened, how we felt, how we could fix the situation. For the first time, the girls mostly led this process themselves. That’s pretty impressive for kindergartners! 

The goal of our  Girl Scout troop is not to create perfect little "cookie-cutter" Daisies who can recite Girl Scout rules and regulations. Our goal is to create an environment where the girls can grow safely together, express their needs, learn new skills, articulate their strengths, and successfully manage a complete range of feelings. We’re just glad they're doing these things while laughing hysterically and pulling great faces!

For more information about encouraging these important skills in young girls, see the book “The Curse of the Good Girl,” by Rachel Simmons.