Anytime I hear the phrase “Make the World a Better Place,” I immediately think of the song “Smile” by Vitamin C. I mean, I was in high school when the song came out and we listened to another one of her songs, “Graduation (Friends Forever),” during our graduation ceremony. Although neither is completely relevant to this post, it did put a smile on my face to reminisce.
Yesterday
Yesterday, Juliette woke me up early because she knew we had a Girl Scout meeting and she didn’t want to miss it. It was actually that I had a Girl Scout volunteer webinar that I didn’t want to miss, but it motivated me to get started. I decided to set up our uniforms, so I brought the ironing board downstairs and then searched for the iron. It’s been around 5 years since I’ve needed to iron anything, so, no surprise, I couldn’t find the iron ANYWHERE. I checked bedrooms, closets, cabinets, no luck. I even checked the basement where my hubby said it would be and didn’t see it. Needless to say, when hubby got home, he too looked where he said it would be and found not one, but two irons. (facepalm… yes, I told him to gloat because he deserved to).
So the webinar was really good and filled with information that makes the idea of leading a troop doable, but we’re not ready for that yet. There were some things that were definitely relevant for a Juliette mentor, but most was more for Troop leaders. I am looking forward to the Juliette webinar in January…
Since it wasn’t a meeting for Juliette, she wanted to do Girl Scout stuff anyway. Later that night, as I prepared our uniforms (her Daisy smock and my adult vest), she saw the Daisy petals that represent the Girl Scout Law. Instead of going through her handbook in order, or going line-by-line for the Law, she wanted to do the pink petal, Make the World a Better Place, so that was our goal for today.
Make the World a Better Place
Directly from the Girl Scouts website, here is how to earn this badge:
Learn how you can make a difference in the world around you and beyond.
1. Start with your community
2. Protect the environment
3. Be a changemaker
When you’ve earned this badge, you will know different ways you can make the world a better place.
As an Independent Girl Scout, the specific ideas in the handbook and volunteer toolkit have to be modified for one since we’re not in a group setting, but we went step by step to earn the badge. Juliette has a notebook that she uses for homeschool, but I decided to include her Girl Scout drawings and notes in there too since they’re so closely related. We talked about ways she can help the community, and this led to a conversation about not having to do everything by yourself. She wanted to build a water fountain for people who are thirsty, but she doesn’t know how to do everything. It would be better to rely on people who know how to do things and learn from them. She drew a picture in her notebook of building the water fountain, complete with a drawing of a phone she used to call God, and the next page included God showing her how to build the water fountain.
She and her little brother protected the environment by decorating reusable bags… ok… paper shopping bags… because that’s what I had on hand and could easily gather for both of them, and technically they are reusable, right? Little brother managed to break four crayons while coloring (he’s hard core), but they kept it up and were proud of their work. Juliette then chose to be a changemaker by learning about climate change in her handbook and from a YouTube video and recording a video about how she could help slow climate change.
Badge Number 3!
Juliette has now earned her third badge, and I’m honestly thinking we may need to switch ahead to the Think Like an Engineer Journey with how much she was talking about engineering during this badge!
- Promise Center (and Home School patch)
- Democracy for Daisies (and 2024 Election patch)
- Make the World a Better Place