Girl Scout Troop Trip to Boston: On Tuesday We Get There

Not gonna lie: I secretly thought that Boston was an out-of-pocket choice for my Girl Scout troop's Spring Break trip. All the kids could tell me that they really wanted to do there was go whale-watching and eat seafood, but then I told them that the whale-watching season wouldn't have started yet when we were visiting, and then none of them actually ranked eating seafood like clam chowder or lobster rolls above a 2 on our 1-5 survey, but somehow they all still wanted to go!

My solution for times like these is to LOAD the kids up with ideas and make them look at and evaluate all of them. I put something like 20 places/activities into our planning doc for our 3-day trip, in addition to stuff the kids had found for themselves, and had them all research and rank every. Single. Thing. I built our itinerary around their favorites, stuck in some educational places and activities that were nearby, and padded the whole itinerary out with enough free time that we could hit up anything else that we found out about while we were there--which was so many things!

Spoiler alert: this out-of-pocket place turned into just about the perfect trip! It's definitely my own personal favorite of all of our Girl Scout troop trips, and I think the kids had a blast, too.

On our first day in Boston, it was enough of an accomplishment to fly there, buy Charlie Cards (we were staying in Chelsea, so we bought 7-Day Commuter Rail Zone 1A passes for our three-day trip. Considering that we used the snot out of them on the train, subway, and bus, we still got our money's worth even without using the full date range) at the airport vending machine (fun fact: there's a vending machine WAAAY at the back of the Logan International Airport baggage claim so you can buy your passes without having to take the bus over to Airport Station; we planned to do carry-on only, so we would not have known this if Delta hadn't forced us to "courtesy check" our carry-ons and we would have spent SO much extra time trekking out to Airport Station and back), take the hotel shuttle to the Hampton Inn Boston Logan Airport Chelsea (another one of my partner's brilliant finds! Super close to the train/bus station and to a grocery store), check everyone in, and take everyone over to the Market Basket across the street for grocery shopping. Our rooms all had mini-fridges and microwaves, and our trip budget plan was that the troop would buy groceries for snacks and anyone who wanted to pack lunches and dinners for otherwise "on your own dime" meals. Most people also wanted to use their own money to buy themselves a little stash of their own private snacks, as my own purchase of diet Sprite and Oreo Thins can attest!

After dinner and a lie-down (at least for me!), we met in the lobby of the Hampton Inn--another bonus to this hotel is that it had a really big lobby with lots of tables and chairs!--for a troop meeting. The kids had been wanting to earn the retired Games for Life IPP for a while now, but we'd just never gotten around to it, so I decided we might as well multi-task and turn it into a travel game-themed badge. 

First travel game? Boston 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:

I got to mark one out right away because it turned out that one of the Girl Scouts and I had each discovered the Hallmark channel on our room TVs, and she and I had apparently spent our free hour the same way, lol!

During our meeting I also handed out what would quickly become our least popular troop activity, ahem: Liberty Junior Ranger badge books! I'd baked into our itinerary the five site visits required to earn the badge, and I expected the kids to finish the books in time to turn them in and receive their Junior Ranger badges during our Friday visit to Faneuil Hall. The kids did nooooooot like doing these books, but they were troopers about it, and they knew just as well as I did that I was not letting them leave Boston without a hearty serving of education along with their fun. I mean, for Pete's sake, these are high schoolers here in the Cradle of Liberty--they're dang well going to learn about it while we're here! 

Ahem.

They're lucky that I didn't also make them complete the Boston African American National Historic Site Junior Ranger badge book--instead, I got a couple of copies from one of the park rangers at Faneuil Hall, and my college kid and I are going to do them together and mail them in for our badges next time she comes home. Thank goodness SOMEONE in my life appreciates the joy that is earning Junior Ranger badges!

And, of course, I could not in all good conscience let the kids go out into Boston without having heard this Kingston Trio classic:

After the meeting, when we were all safe and sound back in our rooms prepping for the next day, our first full day in Boston, you'll be thrilled to know that my kids and I found an Office marathon on the hotel TV. It's always a good omen for our travels when the hotel TV has an Office marathon!

Here's our entire trip:

• Day 1 in Boston: Underground Donut Tour, Old North Church, Paul Revere's House, New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston City Hall Plaza Playground, Boston Public Market, and the North End
• Day 2 in Boston: Tours of Harvard and Simmons, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and Chinatown
• Day 3 in Boston: New England Aquarium, Faneuil Hall, bookstores, and Boston Ballet

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!

My Girl Scout Troop Earned the Ambassador Photographer Badge on an Overnight Trip to Cincinnati

 

And we had such a fun time!

Back when my multi-level Girl Scout troop was younger and very actively earning lots and lots of badges, we followed the philosophy that not every activity got you a badge. Sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Brownies earned badges for, and sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Juniors earned badges for. It was always fun regardless, and there were always lots more chances to earn badges later.

I do NOT follow that philosophy with my older multi-level Girl Scout troop. Up until her graduation, my now-college kid was still pretty active in earning badges independently, but the rest of the troop isn't interested in badge-earning unless it's something that we all do together. And considering that we only meet once a month or so, and many of those meetings are for travel planning or service projects or day trips or Higher Award stuff, not badge-earning, I really want to make our few and far-between badge-earning opportunities count for everyone.

So on this overnight trip to Cincinnati, the Ambassadors AND the Seniors all earned the Ambassador Photographer badge (when we earn a Senior badge together, I find an equivalent badge, whether it's official, retired, or "Council's Own," for the Ambassadors to earn). I rewrote the badge activities to better support the activities we'd planned and the skills the kids would get the most enjoyment out of learning, and off we went!

Step 1: Explore photography resources.

The kids were NOT super excited when, standing in our meet-up spot of the grocery store parking lot at the crack of dawn, just after throwing all their gear into the chaperone cars and just before getting themselves settled in and falling asleep for the two-hour drive, I pulled a GIANT stack of photography resource books out of a tote bag and divvied them up. 

Just a little light reading for the trip to Cincinnati!

These were all library books, and I tried very hard to choose ones that would be interesting to the kids, so I don't think it was too tough of an ordeal to have to endure. Here are the books we explored:

The goals were to see plenty of beautiful photos on a variety of topics, to build context for the history of photography, to get curious about various photographic techniques, and to be inspired to take their own beautiful photographs!

Step 2: Take animal/nature photographs.

The Cincinnati Zoo was the perfect place to practice taking nature photographs! 

The kids who are already well-practiced in photography concentrated on taking interesting photos from interesting angles, but most of the troop really just seems to use their smartphone cameras to take pics of their friends and their cats, so they concentrated on taking well-composed, well-focused photos. It's more difficult than you might think to take a sharp photo of a far-away animal!

While at the zoo, one of my Girl Scouts borrowed my DSLR and took what is possibly my all-time favorite photo of me:

Just me hanging out in the turtle enclosure with my turtle pal!

Step 3: Take city/architecture photographs.

Cincinnati is MUCH bigger than our pokey little college town, and there were lots of interesting things to photograph as we walked around on our own and with our food tour. The nice thing about architecture is that it stands still for you, so all the kids could concentrate on sharp focus and interesting framing.

I like how my college kid, now official Troop Helper to our troop, picked this interesting angle for her shot:

Step 4: Take food photographs.

Is there a more important skill in today's society than that of taking beautiful photos of your food?

We upped our food photo skills on a guided food tour through downtown and Findlay Market, concentrating on taking appetizing, Instagram-able photographs of all the various small plate items we were served:

My own photography was helped by the fact that I quickly got WAY too full to actually eat all the delicious food I was served!

Step 5: Take river/bridge photographs.

At the edge of downtown Cincinnati, there's a pedestrian suspension bridge that crosses the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky. We walked it as a troop, taking lovely photos of the vista across the river and of the bridge, itself.

I don't think that I tend to take very nice vista photos, a deficit that I prefer to blame on my basic kit lens:

I found a weird sticker of a camel to photograph, though!

One of my Girl Scouts entered a photo contest using a photo that she took on this bridge, and it looks freaking amazing, all crisp lines and saturated colors and interesting details. You will not be surprised to learn that she won first place in her category with that photo!

Step 6: Embellish/display photos.

Yes, there are only supposed to be five steps to earn a contemporary Girl Scout badge, so just call this my insurance that even if a kid skived off of a step, she'd still do enough work to fully earn the badge.

Besides, we had a whole evening in our Airbnb to hang out, and there's nothing better when you're hanging out with your buddies than doing lots of craft projects!

My co-leader and I brought all the supplies that the kids needed to create photo stickers and magnets and embroidery floss-wrapped Mason jar lid photo ornaments. It was my excuse to get even more use out of my sticker maker!

Because we obviously wouldn't have our photos from the trip to work with yet (I've been eyeing portable photo printers but I just can't convince myself to pull the trigger on one), I'd asked the kids to upload 6-12 previously-taken photos to a shared Google Drive, then I got them printed and brought them with me to the Airbnb. 

The kids did a lot of baking and chatting and watching TV and playing games and snacking, but they still managed to find time to make themselves stickers and magnets and Mason jar lid ornaments!

If we'd had more time to play around with this badge, I would have loved to have the kids collaborate on a photo book of our Cincinnati trip. I love the idea of them incorporating all of their photos together to make one souvenir album, and I think something like that would be a sweet memento. But these big kids are busy, and after we got home from our trip they had to move onto all of their schoolwork and college applications and extracurriculars and part-time job. Instead, I encouraged everyone to upload their photos to our Shared Google folder so we could all see all the beautiful photos everyone took on our overnight adventure to Cincinnati!

Here are some more photo display and embellishment ideas that I have my eye on for future projects:

• photostrip bookmarks
• DIY Polaroid picture
• Polaroid photo coasters
• marble magnets
• Memory game
• popsicle stick photo charm