1st Grade Girl Scout Troop

This year I volunteered to co-lead Addisyn’s 1st grade Girl Scout Troop.  She was very happy for me to be involved.  Even though we meet just 2x/month, Natalie and I spend quite a bit of time planning and prepping to ensure they get the most out of their short after-school meetings.  Piper is already excited about girl scouting and wants me to help her get started in a troop next year.  I promised I would, and Natalie became very nervous that I was going to abandon her leading…I had to promise not to do that!


Keeping 18 6 and 7 year-olds still and focused on a playground after school is a challenge!  We used the Fuerte "kindergarten playground" for our meeting spot.  Then we figured out splitting them into two groups of 9 helped a lot, so we ran our meetings with two "stations" for rotation.  Natalie would lead the more crafty station and I led the reading the journey book station.

They earned most of their Daisy petals, sold nuts and cookies, and planted the planter boxes in front of school as part of their "leadership Journey".  We are lucky that most the moms are able to help out.  Moms took turns providing healthy snacks, supervising meetings, driving field trips, and running errands to the GS store.  We were thankful to Amie and Jessica for willingly volunteering to be our nut and cookie sales moms.

Water Conservation Garden field trip

Grandma Joyce helped on garden planting day.

Addisyn was excited to sell cookies.  She was very good asking people "Do you want to buy Girl Scout cookies?"  Her sales pitch was that our troop was raising money to "make the world a better place."  She sold to our neighbors and took our red wagon to Cuyamaca College quad one afternoon too.

The troop sold 2819 cookies, exceeding their initial goal.  Addisyn set her sales goal based on the toy prizes she could get and sold a total of 191, not up to the 250 she wanted, but pretty darn good and she got up to and beyond the t-shirt prize, which was her mommy's goal for her.

The girls will finish their Daisy petal patches in the fall (10 petals, each representing a line of the GS law), and will bridge up to Brownies, which is for 2nd-3rd grades.

The girls made great progress this year, from 10 squirmy minutes just to do the friendship circle with adult help, to being able to doing all together without adult help in 2 min in June.

My favorite events were the investiture ceremony when we pinned the official GS pin on each girl, using goal-meters to track our cookie sales, and the special words each girl wrote and read to their secret sister at our last meeting of the year (which we hosted on our back patio).

The first year of Girl Scout Troop 5337: Addisyn, Allison, Anna, Ava, Bella, Cadence, Cate, Gabby, Holly, Justine, Kiersten, Leilani, Lily, Lulu, Mairin, Makena, Olivia, and Zahra.