Troop leader Sharon asked: Our Daisy troop has 17 girls, half in Kindergarten and half first graders. I don’t want to split the troop next year. Looking for suggestions on how to have 2nd year Daisies along with 1st year brownies? Has anyone done this? Can you share your tips for managing a multilevel Daisy Brownie troop?
Our Facebook leaders gave their advice for managing a multilevel Daisy Brownie troop:
- Cara shared: The Brownie badges easily tie into the petals, in fact the downloaded packets for Brownie badge and Daisy petals on MakingFriends® .com lists the Daisy Petal earned with each badge. Troop meetings can be easily combined with the Brownie badge and Daisy petal downloads!
- Rebecca replied: I havee had mixed troop for years, it is more work but worth it. There are a couple of ways to organize your year. First, get a leader to run activities for each set of girls and then do opening, closing and snack together. Second, look at badges and augment things a bit for each meeting to meet requirements for each age group (journeys aren’t too tough to do this with) so that everyone is doing things together but earning age appropriate badge. Third, everyone does stuff together but you alternate which group is working on a badge and others are just along for the fun.
- Melissa suggested: I usually had the Daisies follow along with the appropriate portions of the Brownies’ work and they earned the petals that way. We weren’t blessed with a second leader that stuck to helping but it worked out okay.
- Laurel also has a multi level troop: Our troop of 17 is split as well and our amazing troop leader created a curriculum for the whole year. We always start and end together. Every other meeting (or so) we earn a fun patch. Alternating meetings, we work on journeys separately. With 17 girls you have to have 3 troop leaders, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Stay organized. It’s a lot, but so is any troop with 17!
- Jackie’s advice: It’s actually quite easy to combine the meetings. The petals are pretty vague and can tie easily into a Brownie badge theme. Had to do this for a few years. Once they redid the program it made having split levels much easier.
- Libby explained what her troop did: We had more than one leader. Each leader met with a level. Multilevel is nice when needing to meet bridging requirements. We combined when we could.
- Rita replied: Yes, managing a multilevel Daisy Brownie troop can be done. We did openings together and endings together and split the groups into 2 and worked on badges for their level in the middle. I would do one group and the other co-leader did the other group. This worked very well until the girls got to be Brownies and Juniors.
- Nancy’s approach: Our Daisy’s didn’t have much to do the second year anyway. We just had them earn the brownie badges
Planning for your Daisy and Brownie troop meetings is fun for girls and stress free for leaders with Superhero Downloads available exclusively from MakingFriends® .com. Get 10 Brownie badge and Daisy petal downloads for one price.
