About this time last year, I agreed to be the helper for my middle daughter's Girl Scout Troop.  The leader is a good friend of mine and, in August, her husband was diagnosed with Cancer.  Needless to say, when she asked me if I'd take on the leadership of the troop for a while, there was no doubt I would.  This year has been a great experience for me.

One thing I needed to come up with was a caper chart for our troop.  We'd gained some new girls and had bridged to Brownies since I'd made the last one.  I wanted something easy, that the girls would enjoy.


I had each girl create a doppelganger for herself using markers, googly-eyes, yarn, and wooden ice cream spoons.  They had a blast trying to compare hair colors, skin tones, and clothing design.  Once they were done with their icon, we hot glued the eyes and hair to the spoon and a magnet to the back.  I offered to glue the hair down so it wouldn't fly off to the sides, but most of them enjoyed the Muppet-like quality of crazy hair.


I took an old cookie sheet that we had, roughed it up with sand paper and spray painted it Girl Scout green.  I then printed the job titles that work for our group and ran them through my Xyron machine with magnetic backing.

Now I can change the jobs if need be and I can easily move the girls' magnets to whichever job they are responsible for at our meeting.  And, it's easy to carry and store!

My Boo is a Junior Girl Scout.  She has been working on earning some of her badges this week.  One of the things she's been working on is to use three different mediums to create the same image.  Today she worked on a chalk version of a sunset.


She started out with this drawing.  I showed her how to blend the colors with her fingers and she added a bit more shading.




This was her final product.  Pretty cool for a quick driveway art session.

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.