My Girl Scout Troop Earned the Retired Games for Life IPP During a Troop Trip

What I'm pretty sure will be the last Girl Scout badge I earn with my Girl Scout troop was also one of the most fun!

My Girl Scout troop does earn current, official GSUSA badges, but there's not enough variety in those badges to accommodate the full scope of all their interests (you should hire me to fix that, GSUSA!), so we've always incorporated retired and Make-Your-Own badges into our troop activities. 

In particular, the kids have been wanting to earn the retired Games for Life IPP for over a year, but what with one thing and another, between cookie sales and volunteer work and their high school activities and troop travel and part-time jobs, we just never made time for it. But I also like to have the kids earn a badge while we travel, and considering that there's also not a good Travel badge for Ambassadors (SIGH, GSUSA!), when we were planning our Spring Break troop trip to Boston I figured that this Games for Life IPP would be as good as any to earn then... as long as we rewrote it entirely, of course!

And if you're going to be traveling, what better badge to write than one all about travel games?

That's how this Games for Life IPP turned into the super fun, travel-themed Gamemaker badge. And this is what the kids did to earn it!

Step 1: Teach someone a new-to-them travel game. Learn a new-to-you travel game.

The kids actually completed this step last summer during our troop trip to Cincinnati--I told you they'd been wanting to earn this badge for a long time! When the kids were packing for that trip, I asked them each to include a favorite travel-friendly game. Then while we were hanging out in our AirBnb that night, they spent some time together teaching each other their games and playing them. Turns out my kid isn't the only one with a decade-plus obsession with Professor Noggin!

Step 2: Make and play Travel BINGO.

My partner made super cute blank BINGO cards and printed them two-to-a-page onto cardstock. I brought the cards, pens, and some scrap paper, and bought a couple of pairs of $1 scissors during our grocery shopping trip. I explained the concept of what I wanted us to do, then we all worked for a while on writing out fun BINGO prompts of things to do or see, inside jokes, and little dares, cutting each prompt out, and folding up all the little slips of paper and putting them into a hotel coffee cup. 

We passed the cup around, and each person took a prompt, wrote it in a blank space, and then put the prompt back so someone else could maybe get it. After we'd gone around a couple of times and I'd gotten an idea of the overall tone of the prompts, I also sneakily wrote out a few more and popped them in, ahem. I wanted every kid to have a prompt that was directly about them, and the kids seemed really excited about the prompts that read like little dares. 

When we got to the last couple of rounds I pulled out all the prompts one by one and read them out loud, and people could use their last couple of blanks to "adopt" a prompt if nobody had pulled it yet, or just write one down if it sounded especially fun.

Everyone's BINGO games turned out so great! Here's mine from the first night:

The kids and the chaperones LOVED this activity! It really seemed to encourage everyone to stretch themselves to try new things and put themselves out there a little more than they might otherwise have. We're not very competitive together and there weren't any prizes, anyway, so we just cheered each other on and all tried to get BINGOs.

Step 3: Make and play travel games in an Altoids tin. 

Only a Girl Scout troop leader can travel TO a place with more luggage than they travel home with, because I traveled to Boston with six Altoids tins and a ton of cardstock travel game templates in my backpack, and I came home with zero Altoids tins and far fewer cardstock templates!

For this project, my co-leader donated all the Altoids tins, and I printed several of these gameboard templates and these tangrams. If we'd been home, we would have had more craft supplies available and so could have put the effort into decorating and embellishing the Altoids tins, but for our immediate purposes it was enough for the kids to put together some fun travel games in their Altoids tin, then try them out by playing together. 

Step 4: Play a live-action game.

There are actually tons of games of this sort available when you travel to most cities, from Escape Rooms to Murder Mystery Dinners to Scavenger Hunts or even Geocaching. Boston has all of that, and I was especially tempted by the scavenger hunts, but I was already force-marching the kids around town enough while making them earn their Junior Ranger badges, and the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum is at least less walking!

When we checked in for our tour, we each got a real character to play:

Alas, you didn't *have* to be in character during the tour and activities, so in that manner it wasn't so great for the badge, but the paid actors were VERY in character, so at least the kids got to experience that part of it. 

And we all threw some tea into Boston Harbor, so we *were* all in character a little bit!

Step 5: Play a historical or geographically-relevant game.

I had thought about bringing the supplies for everyone to make a set of Nine Men's Morris and play it, but I was already bringing so many other craft supplies that I ended up deciding not to pack even more. I was VERY excited, then, to see that Abigail's Tea Room, part of the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, not only had sets of Nine Men's Morris, but there was also a costumed actor who taught one of the Girl Scouts how to play.

And then she could teach the other kids!

Step 6: Play some travel solitaire games, then create your own original travel solitaire game for someone else to play.

I printed and packed mazes and word search puzzles for our trip--I had SO much Girl Scout stuff in my luggage! I'd intended for us to do them one night in our hotel, but our last couple of nights had been so busy that we didn't get to them until we arrived at the airport for our flights home.

That actually turned out to be a terrific time to pull them out, since the travel games could really fulfill their purpose of keeping the kids actively entertained while we waited for our flight, then again during the long layover before our second flight. 

I also brought along graph paper (because of course I did) so that the kids could create their own word searches and mazes and Sudokus. I loved seeing what everyone came up with, and some of their word searches were REALLY hard!

This turned out to be the perfect badge for a troop trip! Rewriting badge requirements should be, in my opinion, a far more normalized process within Girl Scout troops. It requires the kids to be actively involved in the planning, it increases relevancy, and it improves buy-in much more than using the pre-packaged activities does. 

These travel games also modeled a screen-free, social way for the kids to entertain themselves during our long travel days. People DO need brain breaks while traveling, and while your phone is always an easy solution, I think the kids saw that ultimately it was a lot more fun to chat together while solving word searches than it would have been for each of them to sit silently together on their phones. Boston BINGO was also SO much fun, and really improved camaraderie and kept everyone mindful of encouraging, cheering on, gently teasing, and just plain interacting with everyone else. 

So, fine, GSUSA. If you'd had an Ambassador-level Travel badge like *I* think you should, we would have just earned that and not stretched ourselves to make this Games for Life badge fit our trip, and we would have missed out on all the fun we had making and playing travel games together. 

I still think you should have an Ambassador-level Travel badge, though... You could even put travel games ON it!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

My Very Own Girl Scout Cookie Booth Calculator: How Many Cookies to Order for Booth Sales

Happy First Week of Girl Scout Cookie Booths!

My Service Unit's Girl Scout cookies are being delivered by semi-trucks this week, and this weekend is my troop's inaugural cookie booth of the season. This is my younger kid's last year in Girl Scouts, and therefore my final year of cookie captaincy. And so, like a Girl Scout Ambassador earning the My Cookie Resume badge, it's time to share what I've learned!

If you're a returning troop, I've written before about my VERY involved process of calculating super accurate predictions of how many cookies to order for booth sales. That process was crucial during the years that my Girl Scout troop was routinely selling 10,000+ boxes of cookies per season, because even a small error in percentage REALLY adds up when you multiply it by 10,000. One year, I miscalculated how many Trefoils we'd need for our Initial Order so badly that it took us almost the entire season to sell just that Initial Order--yikes! 

The last couple of years, however, as the kids have grown up and everyone's high school graduation is now in sight, they've become more focused on spending all those cookie profits on cool adventures, and less on earning even more piles of gold to swim around in like Scrooge McDuck, so cookie sales have chilled out A LOT. That means, as well, that I can chill out on the math quite a bit. So here's my MUCH more casual method of calculation that works just fine for troops whose total sales goal is less than 2,000 boxes. 

And an even bigger cheat sheet: I'll also tell you exactly what percentages we're ordering for booths here in our Central Indiana council, so you can do the same if you think your customers will have the same preferences as our Hoosiers. NOBODY should have to suffer through a season of trying to upsell customers on Trefoils!

The situation that makes this calculation method work particularly well for my troop is that, as a well-established Girl Scout troop, we have a well-established non-Hot Spot location. We've spent years crafting a warm relationship with this business, and during cookie season it's our primary selling spot. So unlike in that booth analytics post where I showed you all my bar graphs comparing different locations at different times over the course of the cookie season, this year I mostly only have to calculate for a single location.

I've also got fewer kids who want to sell at booths this year, so unlike our heyday years when I might have had three booths going simultaneously and some kind of booth running for something like 15 hours over the course of the weekend, this year it will probably just be one or two booths, for probably a max of 4-5 hours, over the course of an entire weekend. It's no longer a struggle to simply have enough cookies in the troop stock to send to booths, so I can afford to be a LOT more chill about precise ordering. 

I miss the excitement... but I don't miss the stress!

ANYWAY...

For a returning troop to make a reasonably precise prediction about cookie percentages for a booth at a single location, find three booth sheets from that location last year. You want booth sheets from super early in the cookie season (and you should be really encouraging the kids to sell hard super early, because that's when your sales will be highest!), and from booths in which you had a full inventory and didn't sell out of anything. You're not going to know how many Toffee Tastics you could have sold if your booth didn't have them in the first place!

For example, I originally pulled this booth sheet, but when I sat down with it I immediately realized that it wouldn't work:

We ran out of Adventurefuls at that booth, dang it! I can't calculate how many we sold if we didn't have them for the entire time!

This one works!

And you can see that I already did my percentage calculations for it--I should hope I did, because Initial Orders were due last week!

To calculate percentages of each cookie, you need to know 1) the total number of physical boxes sold (don't count donations!) and 2) the total number of each type of cookie sold.

The calculation is this:

Type of Cookie = x% of Total Sold

You plug in the numbers for the type of cookie and the total sold, then solve for x.

For instance, Lemon Ups:

9 = x% of 262

9/262 =x%

After you get the answer for 9/262=.034, multiply it by 100/move the decimal two places to the right to get the percent

3.4 =x%

Complete that calculation for each type of cookie, and you'll know what percentages of each you sold at that booth.

Do the same calculations for two more booth sheets, then average them to find the average percent of each type of cookie sold.

Here are the percentages I ordered:

• ADVENTUREFULS: 6%
• LEMONUPS: 4% 
• TREFOILS: 4%
• DOSIDOS: 8%
• SAMOAS: 21%
• TAGALONGS: 11% (I might have under-ordered these, so I'll throw in an extra case when I stock the booth)
• THIN MINTS: 43% (I might have over-ordered these, but you can ALWAYS sell Thin Mints)
• S'MORES: 2%
• TOFFEE TASTICS: 2% (be very conservative about these, because they're SO hard to sell if you overstock them. If you happen to sell out at a booth, just have your troop's Digital Cookie QR code on hand so customers can order for Girl Delivery)

So you know at what percentage you should order; now, you have to figure out how many total boxes to order!

For this, you're not going to average. Instead, if you're a returning troop, find your top-selling booth and calculate that one, then add a little more for optimism and to make completely sure that you won't run out. Our top-selling booth last year sold 262 boxes of physical cookies (don't count donations!) over 5 hours. Divide 262 by 5, and they sold 52.4 boxes per hour. I'll round that up to 60 per hour.

To decide how many boxes of each type of cookie to bring to that booth this year, then, I just have to know how many hours it will run. If it runs for, say, 2 hours, then I should bring 120 boxes of cookies at the minimum, and early in the season I'll pad that even more if I've got the troop stock to do it. I'll definitely throw in another case of Tagalongs so that I don't have to run an emergency case over mid-booth!

And if I have the troop stock, I will ALWAYS round up to the nearest case. I never send partial cases if I can get away with it, because they're just that more unwieldy to carry and count. 

To do the math, break each percentage back down to its decimal, then multiply by 120.

Here are the cookies I would bring to this two-hour booth:

• ADVENTUREFULS: .06 x 120 = 7.2 boxes = 1 CASE
• LEMONUPS: .04 is smaller than .06 so I'm not even going to calculate; I'll just bring 1 CASE
• TREFOILS: 1 CASE
• DOSIDOS: .08 x 120 = 9.6 boxes = 1 CASE, but sometimes DoSiDos randomly sell like wildfire, so if I have it I might even bring 3
• SAMOAS: .21 x 120 = 25.2 boxes = 3 CASES
• TAGALONGS: .11 x 120 =13.2, but I'm worried I underordered so I'm going to throw even another case in there and bring 3 CASES
• THIN MINTS: .43 x 120 = 51.6 = 5 CASES
• S'MORES: 1 CASE
• TOFFEE TASTICS: 1 CASE

If you're a first-year troop, it's SO hard to give you an estimate of how many cookies to bring to your booth. Per-hour rates are very location-specific, and honestly, they're very troop-specific, too! One of my troop's greatest sources of pride is how HARD they work at cookie booths. The kids are all highly experienced, they're very active sellers with multiple tactics, they work specifically to up-sell and solicit cookie donations, and their per-hour sales rate is, therefore, higher than kids who don't put themselves out there that much or are less well-practiced in salesmanship. 

If you're a first-year troop, there are a couple of strategies you can use to help you predict how many boxes of cookies to order for booth sales. One is to use your troop's selling goal, calculated by adding up each kid's individual selling goal, as a target. Order maybe 50% of that at your Initial Order, and for the first couple of booths, bring as much troop stock as you can carry and keep track of. Your goal will be to not run out of cookies so you can get good per-hour sales estimates for future booths. 

If your Service Unit has an active Facebook group or well-attended Service Unit meetings, you can also consult other troop leaders to see what they bring. Just keep in mind that your mileage will vary quite a bit regarding answers! There will be a troop leader who will confidently tell you something like "oh, a couple of cases of this and a couple of cases of that, etc." because they simply don't keep track, or another troop leader who will give you an extremely low number because their kids spend every booth staring at their phones instead of selling, or another troop leader who tells you a GIANT number because their kids are cookie-selling machines.

I've never tried this particular tactic, but I'd also maybe recommend calling your council's cookie staff and asking them if they, by any chance, keep track of booth averages or per-hour sales for your Service Unit booths or even specific Hot Spot booths. They should, because they certainly have all those numbers available to them, but who knows if they're actually doing anything with those numbers, sigh. If it was me on staff you wouldn't even believe how many pie charts and line graphs I'd be shoving in your face!

Y'all, I really can't believe this is my last year selling Girl Scout cookies. What do people even DO with their February when they don't have a house full of cookie boxes?!?

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!

How My High School Girl Scout Troop Earned the (*cough, cough* unofficial *cough*) Harvest Badge

Yes, we made up another Girl Scout badge.

I'm telling you, though, that if you've got a troop of older kids, especially Seniors and Ambassadors like I do, and you're not letting them make up badges, then you're sleeping on some of the best girl-led experiential learning that Girl Scouts offers!

Because if you've got a troop of older kids, I know you know that the official GSUSA badge offerings for those age groups suuuuucks. I'd way rather have a bunch of happy and engaged kids flouting the Girl Scout Badge Police than I would a bunch of bored kids reluctantly working through that same dang Robotics badge for the umpteenth time (Seriously, GSUSA? Three Robotics badges per level? At EVERY level?!? And they're all pretty much the same?!? Please hire me to revamp your badges I will do such an awesome job I swear). 

Anyway... during last Spring's budget/planning meeting my Girl Scouts got super revved up about this cute Harvest badge design--

--and decided that they wanted to earn it this autumn. And so we did!

The kids decided on most of the activities, and I fine-tuned them and sneaked in a few more educational bits. Our local council is also offering an Apple Quest fun patch this season (similar to the one I listed here), so I also bought those and we added in some more apple-themed activities to our plans.

Here are our activities!

Research apple varieties; taste-test apples.

For our apple pie meeting, each Girl Scout was asked to bring approximately five pounds of one apple variety, a small serving plate, and an informational label that they'd researched and created for that variety. 

At the start of the meeting, every Girl Scout sliced one of her apples (giving me a good chance to observe and make sure that they all had appropriate knife skills for our upcoming tasks) and displayed it on its serving plate, then we went around the room and each Girl Scout spoke about her apple variety while we all tasted it. Every apple variety was purposefully bred, so it was interesting to hear what characteristics each variety was supposedly bred for--and if we agreed! The kids also quickly noticed that the apple varieties browned differently, so that was interesting, too.

Make apple pie filling; make homemade pie crust; bake an apple pie; learn to decorate a pie.

As you can tell from the heading, this step accomplished a few of the required activities for the Harvest badge and the Apple Quest fun patch. The Girl Scouts were most excited about baking a pie and decorating it, and since apple pie filling is dead simple and my teenager knows exactly how to make homemade pie crust, I figured that baking an apple pie from scratch was juuuust about doable as a Girl Scout meeting.

And it just about was!

Here's what I asked each Girl Scout to bring:

• approximately five pounds of any variety of apple
• sharp knife
• cutting board
• mixing bowl
• oven mitt
• rolling pin
• measuring spoons and cups
• hair tie or bandana

A couple of the cleverest kids (or the kids with the cleverest parents!) also brought a vegetable peeler and/or a cutting/coring thingy and a dish towel. I attempted to teach everyone how to easily peel and core an apple with just a paring knife, but this did NOT go over well--the kids hated the very idea of it, and they traded around the peelers and corers instead. Kids these days!

I used troop funds to buy all the pie crust and the rest of the apple filling ingredients, as well as aluminum foil, plastic wrap, aluminum pie tins, a 12-pack of Mason jars, and several prepared pie crusts.

After everyone had taste-tested the apples, my teenager taught the rest of the Girl Scouts how to make pie crust from scratch, while my co-leader and I assisted. It was a process, but everyone did create a pie crust! 

The kids wrapped their pie crusts in plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator to chill while I taught everyone the dead simple process of making fresh apple pie filling from scratch. I encouraged the kids to use a variety of apples, relying on their taste-testing to help them choose, and to taste the filling as they went to make sure that it was to their preference. We might have a picky eater or two in the troop, ahem...

When the pie filling was ready, the kids took their pie crusts out of the refrigerator and learned how to roll them out and put them in the disposable pie tins I'd bought. They added the filling, then rolled out their top crust and decided how they wanted to put it on. When planning this meeting, the kids had been interested in learning how to decorate their pies and make cute pie crusts, so I showed them several inspo images from Pie Style, but everyone ultimately decided to make a lattice top, which was a new skill for most.

Then the kids crimped the edges, wrapped their pies VERY well in plastic wrap... and put them back in the refrigerator to take home. We did NOT have enough room to be baking five whole pies at once!

Instead, I brought out the prepared pie crusts and the kids used those, along with any remaining apple pie filling, to make hand pies and/or muffin tin pies. I think they might have liked that activity the best, because they baked quickly and then the kids could eat them!

Learn strategies to use up surplus apples.

Food waste is one of my personal issues (and the troop has those pesky picky eaters!), so it was important to me to show the kids some ways to preserve or prepare apples that you don't feel like eating out of hand or in a pie.

Both applesauce and apple juice are the easiest thing in the world to make, so I had both my giant stock pot and my very old juicer (it was a wedding gift!) out, and at the start of the meeting, since applesauce does take some time, I asked the kids which they'd rather make. They agreed on juice, so at the very end of the meeting, after each kid had cleaned up but before she left, she got to juice herself a pint jar's worth of apple juice to take home with her. This was a new experience for almost everyone, and I think they all really liked it! 

And, of course, the most important strategy to use up apples: while the kids worked, they threw all of their peels, cores, and scraps into a giant bowl in the middle of the table. After we'd cleaned up, I tossed the entire bowl of scraps to the chickens, and they feasted!

Create an apple recipe book.

Since most of those apple pie activities has been to earn the Harvest badge, the kids needed, in my opinion, one more apple-centric activity to completely earn the Apple Quest fun patch, so I made a Shared Google Doc and asked them to each contribute one apple recipe so that we could make a little cookbook.

I'd hoped they'd get super into the project, and at that time we had an upcoming volunteer date at a local food pantry so I also had it in my head that perhaps we could print the recipes into a little booklet for the pantry to hand out during those times when it was swamped with apples, but the kids did not get super into the project, and so we didn't do anything more with it. 

To be honest, I think they were just flat-out sick of apples! But the project did remind me that my favorite cake, Smitten Kitchen's apple cake, exists, and it's just as delicious as I remembered, so as far as I'm concerned the whole thing was a huge success. 

Contribute to a harvest meal for someone in need.

The kids definitely wanted to do a service project as part of this badge, but they dithered a bit over what, exactly, they wanted to do. Also remember that high school kids are VERY busy, and some of these kids were also working on college applications, scholarship applications, Gold Award applications... It is a lot of work to be a high school student these days!

I researched a few opportunities for them to consider, including serving a meal at one of our city's shelters or hosting a food drive for one of the local food pantries. The idea that the kids liked best, though, was volunteering on a specific day to help food pantry patrons choose the components for a Thanksgiving dinner. So the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we went to the food pantry's distribution location and helped fetch and carry and otherwise made ourselves useful. I carried soooo many frozen turkeys!

Make an autumn craft.

The kids wanted to make gnomes, but we kept running out of time to make them. Eventually, when we met to wrap the gifts they had bought for the kid we were sponsoring for Christmas (for the same food pantry as the Thanksgiving project!), I tacked gnome-crafting onto that meeting. 

I actually had almost everything for this gnome project already in my stash, so I just bought a faux fur remnant, rice, and hot glue. The gnomes all turned out sooo cute, with bodies made from one of my partner's old Henleys and hats made from some of my infinite felt stash. 

References and Resources

Here are some other resources I had available during our Harvest badgework:

• The Apple Lover's Cookbook: This book has photos and information about lots of apple varieties, and the recipes are good for Girl Scouts to flip through to see all the yummy possibilities for cooking with apples.
• The Book on Pie: The recipes in this book look DELICIOUS, so it was another book that was fun for Girl Scouts to flip there. There are so many kinds of pie!!!
• Pie Academy: This has good process photos, especially of making the pie crust and making a lattice top. It has several different pie crust recipes, and some unusual recipes for pie fillings (one contains KETCHUP!?!?).
• Pie Camp: This was my main reference book for the pie meeting. I taught the kids McDermott's "20-20-20" method for baking, passed on her tips for preventing a soggy bottom, and demonstrated how to make and use the foil shield that prevents a burned top. We also used her cooking instructions to make the muffin tin pies.
• Pie Squared: These are essentially sheet pan pies, both sweet and savory. This would be a good recipe book if you wanted to serve fresh-baked pie at your Girl Scout troop meeting.
• Pie Style: Even though it was plenty for the troop to learn how to make a lattice pie crust, because decorating pies was something they'd expressed interest in I showed them the photos from this book of faaancy pie decorations. Everyone went "Oooh!," but nobody wanted to give any of the ideas a try just then, ahem...

Overall, I think this turned out to be a very successful badge! The kids wanted to do it and helped plan it, everyone learned a new skill, a couple of kids got a chance to practice their leadership by teaching the others specific techniques, we did some community service, and now each kid has some more practical life knowledge in her toolkit. 

Up next: cookie season, including seeing if I can sneak in a cookie badge or two, and travel planning, including me looking for yet another retired or Council's Own travel-focused badge that these well-traveled kids haven't yet earned. 

Hire me to create more travel badge for older kids, GSUSA! I'll do an awesome job!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Every Council's Own Girl Scout Fun Patch Program That Your Girl Scouts Can Earn from Anywhere: Technology, Engineering, and Math

Welcome back to my series in which I am listing, week by week, topic by topic, every single Council's Own Girl Scout fun patch program that your Girl Scouts can earn from everywhere!

My Girl Scout troop enjoys earning Council's Own fun patches, as well as official badges and retired badges. I usually look for a fun patch that they can earn in addition to a badge whenever we're planning a big project or a trip, etc. This list is essentially just my own research written down for easy reference.

This week's category: Technology, Engineering, and Math! Y'all, Girl Scouts apparently LOVE their STEM fun patches! I separated the science into its own category and this list is still super long. My favorite fun patches here are the couple of math ones, as even with the current STEM craze math still has a bad reputation, and math is still a subject not overtly reflected in Girl Scout badges or most of the other fun patch programs. I think that when people are tasked with creating a STEM fun patch, they often go to the easy, accessible topics and stay there--you'll see below numerous fun patch programs with a similar content area. But it's certainly possible to have a topic that so easily accessible that it will eventually be overused, and it'll then get boring for kids. I cannot even tell you, for instance, how many times my kids have separated out the DNA from a banana (always into a tiny potion bottle with a cord so they can wear it around their necks), catalyzed hydrogen peroxide and called it "elephant's toothpaste," or ran a Beebot through a maze. 

ANYWAY, you don't have to confine yourself to just the easy, most accessible STEM topics. Find a fun patch program that speaks to your kids from this list, and use to to stretch their skills and their imaginations... and do some math!

For this list, I only included fun patch programs that fit the following criteria:

1. Girl Scouts can earn this fun patch wherever they are. I did not include any fun patch programs that have site-specific criteria, unless I felt that those criteria would be easy to substitute and still maintain the point of the fun patch program. I also didn't include fun patch programs that require time-specific criteria that have already passed, such as patches programs designed for the 2020 COVID lockdowns. I noted in the description of each patch when substitutions would be required.
2. Girl Scouts can obtain the council's requirements to earn this fun patch. I found several instances in which the council still sells a specific fun patch, but has deleted all the requirements from its website. If I couldn't find an easy link to those requirements from another site, I did not include the patch.
3. Girl Scouts can obtain the physical fun patch. There were also several instances in which councils still host the requirements for a fun patch program, but no longer sell the patch (or, as in the case of a few GSAK patches, they have fewer than ten remaining). If it is unlikely for a Girl Scout to be able to obtain the fun patch, I did not include it. The link to purchase each fun patch is in the caption for its graphic.

TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND MATH

Backyard STEM and Beyond

Backyard STEM and Beyond, GSAK. Complete these simple outdoor STEM activities to earn this fun patch. This is a good fun patch program to encourage a troop to have outdoor experiences during their regular meetings.

Brighter Together GSAK

Brighter Together, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Use STEM activities to build and grow social-emotional connections. 

Building Possibilities GSGWM

Building Possibilities, Girl Scouts of the Green and White Mountains. Explore engineering through hands-on activities.

Engineering GSNETX

Engineering, Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas. Try engineering activities and learn about careers in engineering.

Explore STEM GSCCC

Explore STEM, Girl Scout Council of the Colonial Coast. Try fun activities in the four STEM fields. 

Girls Code GSAK

Girls Code, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Complete a variety of programming activities to earn this fun patch. This fun patch program pairs well with the Think Like a Programmer Journeys. It would be a good option for a Girl Scout who completes some of the Journey activities but does not do a TAP.

Math GSNETX

Math, Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas. Try math activities and learn about careers in mathematics.

Math Mania GSAK

Math Mania, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Try out games and activities that let you have fun using math. 

Mining in Today's World GSSN

Mining in Today's World, Girl Scouts of the Sierra Nevada. Learn about the mining industry. 

STEM GSEWNI

STEM, Girl Scouts of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho. Complete simple activities in different STEM fields. 

STEM and Coding GSAK

STEM and Coding, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Try a variety of STEM activities to earn this fun patch. This fun patch program pairs well with any of the STEM badges. It's a good one for a younger Girl Scout troop to earn while planning for or earning their first STEM badge.

STEM Connections GSAK

STEM Connections, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Complete a variety of activities that demonstrate how the fields of STEM connect to other areas of life. This fun patch program pairs well with any of the STEM badges and Journeys.

STEAM Dreamers GSBDC

STEAM Dreamers, Girl Scouts of Black Diamond Council. Have one meeting a year completely taken care of by earning this monthly STEAM fun patch! Older Girl Scouts will likely want to modify or substitute some of the activities to add rigor. Request the patch program materials here.

STEM Explorer, GSC

STEM Explorer, Girl Scouts of Citrus. Complete activities from a checklist to try out different STEM skills. This is a great fun patch program for Girl Scouts to complete independently.

STEMing Daisies GSSS

STEMing Daisies, Girl Scouts of Silver Sage. Daisies earn this fun patch by trying out simple and fun STEM activities. This fun patch program pairs well with any of the Daisy STEM badges. It's a good patch program for Daisies to try to help them decide when STEM badge they want to earn first.

STEMtastic GSSS

STEMtastic, Girl Scouts of Silver Sage. Try out a variety of different activities while learning about some of the fields of STEM. This fun patch program pairs well with any of the STEM badges. It's a good fun patch program to earn to help a troop decide what STEM badge they'd like to pursue.

Here's a look at my complete fun patch series:

• Arts and Crafts
• Culture, Diversity, and Equity
• Games and Sports
• Geography/History
• Outdoors
• Practical Life Skills
• Reading and Writing
• Science
• Service Learning
• Social-Emotional Skills
• Technology, Engineering, and Math

Follow my Craft Knife Facebook page for more Girl Scout resources as I exhaustively compile them!

Juliette Gordon Low and the Older Girl Scout Experience

National Girl Scout week was last week! I hope that everyone celebrated the founding of Girl Scouts, ate some Girl Scout cookies, did a little craft project, and then had a shockingly adventurous and absolutely life-changing outdoor experience!

Y'all might remember that Juliette Gordon Low is my biggest hero. I love so much about her--her passion for travel, her commitment to bettering the lives of girls, the fact that all of her major achievements happened past the age of 50, the way that she normalized living and working and doing so many amazing things with a physical disability. I even kind of love that she was known for being pushy, stubborn, and light on the details of her big plans, because that is just about the opposite of how history normally loves to portray its heroines.

Juliette Gordon Low is a wonderful role model for all kids, but in the Girl Scouting movement it's pretty common to just have the little ones celebrate and learn about her life. The little kids make Flat Juliettes and send them on adventures, learn some facts from her biography, throw her a birthday party around Halloween, and then it's off to learn about insects or social dance or balloon-powered cars.

The occasional lucky troop may make their own pilgrimage to Juliette Gordon Low's home, but most Girl Scouts don't think a lot about Juliette Gordon Low after their first year or two learning about her. And that's such a shame, because as great a role model as she is for any kid, I think she's an especially great role model for the older Girl Scout. The teenaged years are when girls really need all the role models they can get of brave, wild women who travel and do good works and are pushy and stubborn. And Low, herself, had a special affinity for older girls, and would have loved these modern teenagers if she'd ever had the pleasure to meet them.

So here are some of the ways that I like to connect my Girl Scouts with the founder of our movement. 

Celebrate Founder's Day and/or National Girl Scout Day

Founder's Day, or Juliette Low's birthday, is on Halloween, and National Girl Scout Day, the officially recognized date of the founding of Girl Scouts, is March 12. I like that they're roughly half a year apart, because if your troop tends to be busy during one holiday, you've got a good shot at them not being super busy on the other!

Juliette Gordon Low was a high society lady, and she loved herself a good tea party. Afternoon tea is actually one of the older Girl Scout experiences that you can book at her birthplace! A DIY version of a tea party is a fun way for Girl Scout to earn the Cadette New Cuisines badge and the Ambassador Dinner Party badge--the Senior Locavore badge doesn't work quite as well for this, but there are some retired Interest Patches that would certainly apply.

Low also loved art, and up to the end of her life was constantly trying to improve her various artistic skills and learning new ones. She particularly loved drawing and sculpture, and learned how to weld as an older adult. Every now and then my Girl Scout troop toys with the idea of attending at Cookies and Canvas-type event, and I've always thought that this would be a fun activity to incorporate into a larger celebration of Low's life.

Both Founder's Day and Juliette Gordon Low's birthday make good occasions for a troop service project. I LOVE service projects that come around yearly, like donating cookies to a local youth shelter right after cookie season and Christmas shopping for economically disenfranchised kids, because it's less for me to have to think about planning for the year and more that the kids can look forward to every year--having activities that kids look forward to is crucial to older Girl Scout retention! 

My troop already has yearly service projects planned around cookie season and Christmas, so we've never done anything particular for Founder's Day or Low's birthday, but I've heard of troops that assemble DIY birthday kits containing an aluminum baking pan, boxed cake mix and oil and frosting, a pack of birthday candles, and a Happy Birthday banner to donate to a local food pantry for Founder's Day. I've also heard of troops that create a little green-themed gift set, with onesies, a Juliette Low picture book, a couple of soft toys, and a gift certificate for a year's membership to Girl Scouts when she's old enough, and donate it to local hospitals to pass on to the first girl born on March 12. It's a super cute idea, but you'd definitely have to run it by council first, because I won't be surprised if the cost of membership goes up within the next five years!

Ceremonies

special bags ready to hold the candles for our Eternal Flame ceremony

I'm not personally big on ceremonies, but this was a specific request of one of my older Girl Scouts, so I've been making more of an effort the past couple of years. And since Juliette Low, herself, LOVED a good Girl Scout ceremony, it's definitely something worth incorporating into older Girl Scout meetings. 

The Eternal Flame ceremony is a particularly good one for older Girl Scouts, because it's meant to be conducted when there are Girl Scouts who are transitioning away from the troop. My Girl Scout troop conducts this ceremony during our yearly Bridging/Graduation celebration now that we've got a high school graduate or two every year. 

We put our own spin on the ceremony in that, after a leader tells the story of Juliette Low and her first troop of Girl Scouts who'd grown up and were ready to fly away and share their spark with the rest of the world, we light our candles in honor of our own Girl Scouts who are about to fly away. As each person's candle is lit, that person shares something about the Girl Scouts we're honoring--a favorite memory, their hopes for her, or just their best wishes. It's a lovely ceremony, and a great end-of-Girl Scouts memory for our graduates.

Other especially good ceremonies for older Girl Scouts include any Scouts' Own, flag ceremonies (you can be proactive and volunteer your troop's services to any civic organizations for their upcoming events), kid-organized Journey ceremonies, and Court of Awards whenever a kid earns the Silver or Gold award.

Badges and Fun Patch Programs

There's never been an official badge related to Juliette Gordon Low, which is a bummer, but the Girl Scout Way badge at any level can easily be themed to her. What there are, though, are thoughtfully created council-based fun patch programs, with plenty of activity suggestions (that you can take or leave, of course--my Girl Scout troop tends to rewrite EVERYTHING!) and beautifully designed patches. Here are three current ones:

• Juliette Low from Girl Scouts of North-Central Alabama
• Juliette Gordon Low from Girl Scouts of New Mexico Trails
• Year in the Life of Juliette from Girl Scouts of the Green and White Mountains

Primary Source Exploration

Kids don't get enough experience working with primary sources in school, which is a shame, because historical primary sources can be so entertaining! Historical Girl Scout manuals and badge books and leader guides are easy to interest today's Girl Scouts in, and they're wonderful for building historical context and helping a kid feel connected to her Girl Scout history. 

My favorite historical primary source to show Girl Scouts is the 1918 silent film, "The Golden Eaglet":

Not only is it absolutely adorable, but it centers the experience of the older Girl Scout! 

AND it features a cameo by Juliette Low, herself!

I particularly love how this look at 1918 Girl Scouting shows so much in common with today's Girl Scouts. We still learn first aid, camp and learn how to cook outdoors,. The Child Nurse badge became the Babysitter badge, but what kids lost in not learning how to bathe a baby they've gained in learning Child/Infant First Aid and CPR. And we don't commonly teach the Scout Pace anymore, but after laughing their butts off at it my kids tried it... and it's a BRILLIANT way to cover ground quickly!

At the same time, the kids are always thrilled to bits at the parts that are VERY different from today. Girl Scouts does ZERO marching in formation these days, lol, and there's no semaphore or Morse code (if you want to sneak in some extra history education, you can talk about why Girl Scouts was more militarized in 1918). The kids also marvel at how they'd never walk into the home of someone who was sick and completely take over all the housework, yardwork, and childcare... and then, of course, you can talk about what your troop could do in service instead. Meal Trains and yardwork are services that are still VERY welcome!

It's a little harder to find a connection to Juliette Gordon Low by earning retired Girl Scout badges, even though my troop LOVES to earn retired badges, simply because the physical badges that were available during Low's lifetime are, of course, precious antiques now, and you'd never sew them onto a kid's current Girl Scout vest. But the retired badges that ARE available for love or money on ebay and Facebook groups are still terrifically fun to earn, and get kids involved in activities that are less common today.

Kids generally enjoy just looking through and discussing whatever you can find for them to peruse, whether it's the old Girl Guides or catalogues or issues of American Girl magazine (which used to be run by Girl Scouts before it was run by Pleasant Company) or the 1920s girls' novels written about the adventures of a Girl Scout troop at a female boarding school--think Tom Brown's School Days but even more wholesome! Honestly, the kids love it as a stand-alone activity, but if you wanted to bake in more leadership skills and problem-solving practice and service hours, kids could prepare a presentation for a younger troop or Service Unit meeting.

If you find that one particular kid is really getting into the history stuff, encourage them to turn their love of history into a Gold Award project!

Travel

Travel was one of Juliette Low's enduring passions, so every time we give the gift of travel to our Girl Scouts, we're connecting them to the history of our founder. Low was known to be an exceptionally adventurous traveler for her time, and thought nothing of traveling for months with only very basic necessities at hand, in accommodations and using transportation that was atypical for most tourists coming from Western Europe or North America. 

Older Girl Scouts connect with Juliette Low's legacy by learning the skills to become confident trip planners and travelers, from budgeting to figuring out transportation and accommodations to practicing resilience to venturing out of their comfort zones and having big adventures. It's nice that this is still such a key part of the Girl Scout movement, and it's something that my troop absolutely adores. 

But of course, Girl Scouts can also pilgrimage to some of the actual places important to Juliette Low! Savannah, Georgia, is a terrific destination for national travel, and taking my own two kids to Juliette Low's home, the home of Girl Scouting, is one of my favorite Girl Scout memories. But anything historically associated with Girl Scouts can forge those same connections, like the national headquarters in New York City, Low's plaque in Washington, DC, or any of the WAGGGS centers--I'm planning for my family to pop by Pax Lodge when we're visiting London this summer so we can participate in the flag ceremony, collect our pins, and hopefully earn one of their fun patches. My excitement is palpable!

Further Reading

These older kids are capable of reading adult biographies of Juliette Gordon Low, but I can't imagine even the most enthusiastic Cadette being interested in the 300-page biography that I recently plowed through, complete with an extensive index and list of primary sources for my further reference pleasure. I like to read non-fiction books about Low and early Girl Scouting/Girl Guiding, however, and I enjoy sharing the best of what I've learned both with my Girl Scout troop and in adult training workshops at the council level. 

Children's and picture books, although they're below the reading level of older Girl Scouts, are still enjoyable for them to skim through and talk about during a meeting. You can turn it into a project by handing them a pile of these books and suggesting that they rank them or write book reviews. You can turn it into a service project by suggesting that the troop could buy copies of their favorites to donate to a local public or school library that doesn't already own them.

• Who Was Juliette Gordon Low?, by Dana Meachen Rau
• Daisy and the Girl Scouts, by Fern G. Brown
• First Girl Scout: The Life of Juliette Gordon Low, by Ginger Wadsworth
• Here Come the Girl Scouts, by Shana Corey. This is my favorite of the children's books about Low. I think it really captures how exciting it must have been to be an early Girl Scout, and how involved and caring Juliette Low was in working with the children. I always tell fellow Girl Scout volunteers that our professional staff are hired for their passion for providing service to children, NOT for their administrative skills (and it shows, ahem!), and to be honest, that's simply a tradition passed down from our founder, herself. 
• Helping Hands: A Paper Doll History of the Girl Scout Uniform, by Kathryn McMurtry Hunt. Hint: You can scan these and print them on transparencies or shrink plastic, or change the sizing and make them into charms. You can also color copy them onto super thick cardstock so that each kid can have her own set. 
• Juliette Gordon Low, America's First Girl Scout, by Kathleen V. Kudlinski
• Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts, by Stacy A. Cordery.  I'd been meaning to read this particular biography for years, so I took COVID as my excuse to finally work through it. The most notable takeaway, to me, is that Low was firmly in favor of making it possible for cognitively-impaired Girl Scouts to earn the Golden Eaglet, and after she retired she even published an opinion piece in their leader magazine encouraging it and opposing an opinion piece written by the current president of Girl Scouts who was against it. My hero!
• How the Girl Guides Won the War, by Janie Hampton. This isn't about Low or Girl Scouts, but specifically about the UK Girl Guides during World War 2. Kids were doing the same types of activities on both sides of the ocean, but the Girl Guides had the added terror of the London Blitz to contend with, and it's fascinating to read about ALL of the considerate, caring, brave, helpful, thrifty activities that these children, especially the older ones, participated in. 

I've been going hard in cookie mode for the past couple of months, so this is my own personal reminder to incorporate some early Girl Scout history into my next troop meeting. We'll be celebrating finishing up cookie sales, taste-testing ABC Baker cookies and the new Raspberry Rally, writing thank-you notes to businesses that hosted our cookie booths, and updating some of our marketing materials while it's all fresh in our minds--perhaps we can bake the original Girl Scout cookie recipe, too!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!