AHG Unit Leaders - How to Plan Badge work for the Year
How exciting, we have a new year upon us as well as a new theme, Victorious! And with that, so much to get to plan. I want to break down for you how I and my co-leaders planned our badge work for the year. Before you get started, you want to have a calendar in front of you and if possible, a copy of last year’s calendar to reference as well. It helps to see how many weeks you have to plan for as well as look back at last year to see what worked in the schedule, what didn’t, how many troop meetings were cancelled due to weather, what annual events you have, and other helpful insights that you can bring with you into this year. You’ll also need your AHG Handbook in the proper level for your unit to reference the badge work, of course.
AHG Handbook
Calendar - current (and last year’s is optional)
Optional, Program Year Theme Guide (found in AHG Family under resources)
Writing utensils, paper, sticky notes
Now that you’ve got the essentials for planning, you can begin thinking about the badge work you want to accomplish with your unit this year. The amount of badges you can complete together will definitely be determined by the unit level you teach as the younger units’ badges aren’t as labor-intensive as the higher unit levels like Pioneers and Patriots are, but I will be speaking mostly from my experience as a Pathfinder and Tenderheart unit leader, and as a Tenderheart leader, I was a co-unit leader with 3 other ladies, so the work was split amongst the four of us and I’ll be referring to that experience as well as I talk about how to plan your year.
Before everything else, before a meeting, before getting excited about the theme, before getting excited about the badges… PRAY.
“Dear Heavenly Father, be with our unit as we learn more about you, as we go into planning. Help us be effective at sharing Christ with our girls as well as helping them grow in new skills and learning new things. Bless our time together, AMEN.”
Get out your calendar/s now, as this is the probably the biggest part of planning the year out. You need to mark on your calendars the weeks you will be meeting. My previous troop and my current troop both meet 3 nights per month. When seeing how many weeks we have available, it also really helps to count how many meetings you have between the first meeting leading up to Christmas break and secondly how many weeks between returning from break until you stop monthly meetings in the spring (if that is your structure). Because my troops started in September and then had a couple of special meetings where we couldn’t really do badge work because the badge work, we had a much shorter “half” of the year to complete badges before Christmas break. We were able to fit in a badge and a partial badge’s worth of work for Tenderhearts, plus a special meeting for Operation Christmas Child packing party, plus Faith Award work with the amount of meetings we had available. In the second half of the year, we were able to finish up the one badge plus do two more plus a patch and a couple Faith Award meetings, too. You need to seriously look at the badge requirements and see how long each of the requirements may take. With the Tenderheart level, we found we could complete badges in about 3-4 weeks each. That will definitely vary as you get into the higher levels, and with the Pathfinders, their stepping stones requirements can be earned in just one meeting (one Frontier activity per meeting).
Okay, so at this point, you probably have the amount of weeks you have available to dedicate to badge work. Now it’s time to look at the badges themselves. I like to take a look at the year program theme guide (I would even look at the program theme patch, too, for even more inspiration). You do not HAVE to do this, but we really enjoyed aligning our badge work for the year with the theme. For Vision, for example, my co-leaders and I decided to do “All God’s Children”, “Freedom Seekers”, “Astronomy”, and “Scrapbooking”. These badges all had elements of how to SEE people through God’s eyes, observing through sight and instruments, and looking at what God has done in our lives just as the VISION theme suggested. Maybe your unit did some of the badges AHG recommends for this year’s theme last year. That’s okay! There are many ways the badges tie into the theme and a lot of the time it’s just fun to do badges you want. My unit leaders and I just really loved taking inspiration from the theme guide to make the year theme come even more alive for the girls.
Take into consideration the weather and what badges you can do outside. My troops that I’ve been a part of are in Ohio. We have a lot of cold, yucky weather for the better part of our evening meetings plus it being dark for most of them as well. We therefore would do a lot of indoor badge work and push the more outdoorsy parts towards the beginning few fall meetings, to spring, or try to get some outdoors activities done during extra troop activities that may happen on weekends.
When picking from the badges you are showing interest in, it is important to try to spread your choices out between the six Frontiers — Heritage, Family Living, Arts, Outdoor Skills, Personal Well-Being, and Science & Technology. You want to help get the girls’ “honeycomb” of badges for their vest (you start with the Joining Award or Level Award in the middle and then add one badge from each frontier around it) as well as getting them closer to earning their Level Award. This also gives many opportunities to dip their toes into different topics and activities instead of maybe focusing all on crafts or all on science and tech, etc. We want to give all our girls a well-rounded experience.
Do you have your badges picked? Great! Now, look at your calendar. Start plugging in when you want to accomplish each badge. You do need to do a bit of guesstimating how many weeks you may be able to accomplish a badge, but just try to be realistic about how long each part of the badge work will take. What I like to do is say, okay we have these 3 weeks here to plug in a badge. Let’s look at the badge requirements. Hm… Requirements #1, #4, and #5 group together nicely, so I’ll put those together on one meeting. #2 will take probably a whole meeting on it’s own. #3 we are going to read a book to accomplish, and #6 is a craft, we could do the craft while reading the book to give the girls something to do with their hands (if they are little girls). (These numbers do not reflect an actual badge’s requirements, they just are made up to reflect my thought process). Sometimes if a part of the badge work is really information heavy, I may split that part up with some of the activities that are more hands-on between two weeks or begin a crafty/project oriented thing during the information and learning part to help make it not so boring. For example, when I lead the scrap booking badge, I didn’t just talk about all of the tools and materials used and THEN we got into the actual making part of the scrapbook badge, I went ahead and put the tools and things out in front of them and explained what we’ll be making, then as we were making it, I talked about the tools and materials. It was a challenging badge to keep 24 squirrelly Tenderhearts from zoning out if I had just talked at them about what we were doing the whole time. You do not have to do the badge requirements in order, you can change them up and group them together to suit your unit’s needs. When we did the badge last year, “Women of Faith”, with our current troop, the leaders picked out which women in the Bible we were going to read about and then spread them out over the course of 4 weeks, reading about one lady at a time and then paired that with a fun activity each week. Grouping too much reading together looses the girls, and we had a mix of ages completing the badge together. The older Explorers helped the Tenderhearts follow along in the Bible when a lot of the younger girls couldn’t read. It took some coordinating on the leaders’ part, but having the Tenderhearts and Explorers do some badge work together made for a really great experience, too, so if you think that an older or younger unit may like to do the same badge during the year, try to see if you can do some of it together.
Did you get your badges plugged into the calendar? Congrats! You’ve planned your badge work for the year. You can now focus on how you are going to prepare for your badge work for each week instead of planning as you go. I hope this helped the leaders preparing for this upcoming year!
