Two of my daughters are involved in the Girl Scouts of America organization. One is a Brownie (almost a Junior) and the other is a Daisy. Parents volunteer to lead various Try-Its (for Brownies) and Petal activities (for Daisies) on a rotating basis. I volunteered to help the Daisies learn about concepts behind the orange petal - being responsible for what I say and do.
As part of learning to be responsible, after consulting with the troop leader, I came up with a simple kaper chart for the girls. For those who aren't into the scout lingo, a kaper chart is similar to a responsibility/chore chart. There are many different ways to handle a kaper chart. Boo's Brownie troop has a magnetic board where each girl's name is placed next to one of the jobs that needs to be done. The responsibilities are changed at the beginning of each meeting so that everyone has a chance to do each job.
As part of learning to be responsible, after consulting with the troop leader, I came up with a simple kaper chart for the girls. For those who aren't into the scout lingo, a kaper chart is similar to a responsibility/chore chart. There are many different ways to handle a kaper chart. Boo's Brownie troop has a magnetic board where each girl's name is placed next to one of the jobs that needs to be done. The responsibilities are changed at the beginning of each meeting so that everyone has a chance to do each job.
For Bug's troop, I wanted to come up with something that allowed the leaders to have helpers but wanted to be less specific about the jobs because of the younger age and different activities of the Daisy troop. I also wanted to have some continuity with the Daisy theme and chose to use flowers for our chart. We have a "bloom" side (which means that the girls listed are the helpers for the week) and a "growing" side (which means those girls are the helpers for the next meeting).
Specifics on how I made it... I bought a small towel at Ikea (it was cheaper than buying fabric remnants!), some clothes pins and wooden flower shapes, and a spool of green ribbon. I doubled the ribbon and sewed it so that there are 5 "pockets" on each stem which allow the clothes pins to clip on. The clothes pins are painted green and hot glued to the flowers. I used paint and a paint pen to decorate the flowers. The bloom & grow flowers are made of fun foam as I couldn't find any precut larger flower wood shapes. The troop number was printed on printable fabric and sewn on. To hold it up, I sewed a stip of ribbon across the back, leaving the center hollow so a dowel rod can be stuck in. The towel already had a simple handle which we use to tack up the chart to the bulletin board for our meetings.
I decided to put this out there because when I was trying to get ideas, I was very disappointed that there weren't very many images or pictures of what others had done. I hope that this is helpful for others in similar situations.
I love those flower clothespins! And the Ikea towel ... what a clever idea.
What I like about the towel concept is the ability to roll it up for storage - great idea! We have a mixed (Daisy/Brownie) troop as well. THanks for sharing your solution!
I love this idea! Thanks so much for sharing it. I copied it for our troop as well... I especially like that we can roll it up for storage.
I love this idea, but how do you know what the chores are?
For our Daisy troop, at the time, they didn't have specific jobs. Everyone was a meeting helper. I think we had the top name be the pledge/promise leader. You could easily assign jobs to the loops and clip names to the specific loops. As the troop has grown, more specific jobs have been added and we have gone through a caper chart change.