Girl Scouts Daisy Troop Events

My Daisy troop has been a group of busy little gals! We have done a lot of fun projects over the year. The picture above is our Mother's Day planters. The girls painted a pot and then planted a geranium to give as gifts. They had a really fun time!
The picture below is of our Community Service Project. The girls chose to clean up around their school grounds and plants some flowers and bushes. It was a lot of work, but they did an outstanding job and worked very hard to earn a Community Service Badge.

The next set of pictures is from our first Girl Scout Day Camp at Camp Howard. We all got up early and headed out for a much anticipated day of fun. The girls were very excited. I only had 4 that could go for this event, but it turned out later that it was a good thing there was only 4 of them!

The girls learned all bout fire safety. They learned how to build a campfire site, strike a match, how to properly put out a campfire and even about Stop, Drop and Roll!

Snack Time!

We ended our day a lot earlier than expected. The first few activities they had planned were great for Daisy's age level. Unfortunately, as we got to the lunch piece of the day, things went a bit sour. It said on the schedule our lunch time was 11:30, good thing because the girls were very hungry by this time. When we got to where we thought we were going to eat lunch, we found a very different scenario than what we expected. They wanted the girls to cook all of their lunch...not a bad thing by any means- only one problem...
They wanted them to cook vegetable chicken stew, cornbread, mac-n-cheese and something for dessert as well. They handed all the girls plastic knives, a 10 pound bag of potatoes, carrots and even a big bag of onions. They were suppose to cut/chop up all these veggies with the plastic knives. I thought, WOW...this will be interesting! I tried to stay positive and encourage the girls to do what was asked of them. After about 35 mins of knives breaking, a few stabs on the fingers from broken plastic knives and a few tears from different girls- I was fed up. None of the troops were making any progress and everyone was clearly upset that this was how they had planned a Daisy level troop lunch. I found the lady in charge and asked if there was something else we could do because all the knives were broken and the adults didn't even have any knives to help move the process along. She walked away and came back carrying 3 big bags of frozen chicken breasts!!! She said that the chicken needed to be cut up first so they could start boiling it. I looked at her like she was nuts...I blurted out that my troop was not handling raw chicken, nor did we even have the proper utensils to cut up ANYTHING. I told her that it was very un-sanitary and dangerous health-wise to have a bunch of 5 - 6 year old's handling raw meat. She then glared at me and replied with "how do expect them to learn to cook then?"
I didn't respond to her question, I just said that there had to be something else that we could do. She then said well, I guess your troop won't have anything to do. I could not believe how she was behaving in front of everyone and that she was OK with saying that to me in front of all of those girls! I was furious! Luckily, many of the other troop leaders spoke up and said they didn't want their girls handling raw chicken either and this whole activity was becoming a bit ridiculous. By this time an hour had gone by and we didn't have all the vegetables even chopped up, much less cooking on the camp stoves! Not to mention that we were outside and it was very windy and cold. My hands were so frozen, they ached. I have no idea what happened after that because we booked it out of there. My girls were beyond done and even the two parent helpers I had with us were very ready to go. I am sure it's safe to assume that those poor girls didn't get lunch for a LONG WHILE!!

So, we checked out and left. I felt bad, but was mostly disappointed. The girls had been talking about GS Camp for months and we were all very excited about it. It was a big let down. I will definitely be filing a complaint. It was very unreasonable, poorly planned and unfair to our girls!
I didn't want the day to be ruined, so we took the girls out for pizza and played some games there. We all warmed up after a bit and talked about the fun parts of camp and then headed home. I hope next year goes a whole lot better!