Celebrating 100 years of Girl Scouts

We usually celebrate with at least cupcakes for snack. In my planning, I wondered if the group of second grade Brownies would enjoy decorating cupcakes themselves. I decided to make mini cakes in a nice square mini cake pan I have. I used my new trick of substituting 1 cup of Greek yogurt and 1 cup of water in place of the eggs and oil for boxed cake mixes. I used a moist Devil's food and also a moist yellow cake mix. They both tasted great and came out a touch denser than usual.

I made up a double batch of buttercream frosting. Half I separated into three one cup dishes for coloring pink, purple, and yellow. The rest I colored green. Before the meeting, I made up six decorator bags of frosting. I used the Wilton disposable bags and one piping tip and one flower tip for each color. The green was separated into three smaller dishes with plastic knives for frosting the cakes.

The girls each took their time with decorating and the fourteen of them had no trouble taking turns with the six decorator bags. I was impressed with their creativity and excitement.

Other activities we did at our meeting included coloring and cutting out paper dolls and hearing the story of Juliette Gordon Low. I chose the paper dolls because girls 100 years ago may have been playing with paper dolls also.

For the story, I used suggestions I found on the Internet. I collected all kinds of props that would be relevant to the story. Before I started telling the story, I randomly handed out the props. I had a plush jack o'lantern, a silk daisy, a paint brush, a painted tea cup, a toy horse, a bag of salt water taffy which was shared at the end, a map of the world placemat, a toy boat, a toy ring, a bag of rice, a telephone, a picture of a boy scout mounted on cardboard, a play pearl necklace, a picture of an old Girl Scout manual mounted on cardboard like a book, a mini basketball, a first aid kit, and a breast cancer pink ribbon bracelet. The girls listened very intently as I told the story and they showed everyone their object when I talked about it. This is a great way to tell a story!

After the story, I collected the props again and chose ten to lay on a small blanket. Then I asked the girls to study the objects and I would take one away when they looked away. Then they would guess which one was missing. We played this a few times. Another game would be to have them write down all the objects after studying them.

We did have an extra fifteen minutes at the end and started making our SWAPs.

It was a successful meeting and meaningful too.