People ask me “how do I get my troop ready to travel?” I think there are some basic skills that you can start developing in your troop meetings even when girls are Daisies that will help them become great travelers as they get older. 

One of those skills is learning to Compromise!

Learn to Take Turns Learning to take turns is a good way to compromise!

In your Daisy or Brownie circle practice taking turns speaking with a “talking feather” (or something else like that). In Native American tradition you passed a ceremonial feather when you had the floor and no one else would interrupt while you held the feather and were talking. This is good practice for girls who like to be the center of attention and for shy girls who have trouble with that. 

Kaper charts are great for helping girls take turns at various chores or tasks during troop meetings or while camping. We had a kaper chart that included saying the pledge and promise, picking a song of the day, picking a talking question for the day, setting up and cleaning up from our project, setting up and cleaning up from our snack and bringing the snack, picking a game to play, and even who got to start the friendship circle squeeze at the end! The girls learned about teamwork and taking turns doing the fun and not so fun tasks that we had at our meeting.

When we started to travel a lot, when they were in high school, they enjoyed researching a part of the trip and being our “leader for the day”. They were amazing tour guides with all kinds of interesting things they discovered that they were excited to share. This can also work in troop meetings or in co-ops where mother daughter teams plan the badge work for particular meetings. I think practicing these leadership skills are fun and important. Learning to take turns being the leader OR the listener/follower is great too. It’s difficult when everyone wants to be in charge.  

Learn about Choices  Using information to make an informed choice…have each girl take turns advocating for something…is a good way to compromise on decisions.

This is a little like having a debate. In our troop we would have two girls agree to present the pro and con of an idea and then the group discusses and chooses. This worked for us when we were thinking about where to travel or where to go on a field trip. It was fun to have a team of 3 girls take each side and present THEN to switch and present again! 

One of my favorite troop games we called “Hot Dogs and Hamburgers”. It was a game about choices. The girls would get into the middle of the meeting room and the leader (we took turns being leader) would call out Hot Dogs (and point to one side of the room) or Hamburgers (and point to the other side.) The girls would go to the side that was their “favorite”. We would go on and say “orange juice – milk” “dogs – cats”, “pancakes – waffles”, “sisters – brothers”, “airplanes – trains”, “Disneyland – Soak City”… we could go on for hours! If it was something you had both of (like brothers and sisters or dogs and cats) you could stay in the middle. We often ended up in a pile of giggles, out of breath and ready to rest. I liked the game because it wore them out when they were tired of sitting and there weren’t any wrong answers. You could choose differently from the group and it was ok. We also learned that different girls in the group liked the same things! It broke the girls out of their cliques. As they got older it was an opportunity to talk about peer pressure and about making your own choices and about going against popular opinion.

Brainstorm and Vote this is one of the methods of compromise we used all the time! Our rules were: all ideas are good when we were brainstorming, give everyone a chance to speak, get all the ideas out before we discuss them. 

We used lots of different voting games  and voting methods:

• write choices on posters and vote with stickers,
• Agree: wave both your hands in the air ✔ No opinion: Fold your arms across your chest ✔ Disagree: put both thumbs down and stamp your feet
• written ballots (if it seemed like personalities and cliques were getting in the way of honest votes.)
• beans in cups. We made a cup for each choice and then put a bean into the cup for each positive comment during discussion and took a bean out if we thought about a negative for an idea.

There are lots of ideas for ways to come to consensus and to practice compromise. These are some that worked for my troop. We got to be really good at sharing ideas and getting each other excited about things! This is a great way to get girls involved in planning in your troop too. The more input they have into decisions about what you’re going to do the more they enjoy the program!