Daisies Meeting Three: Blue Petal - Honest and Fair
This week we focused on Honesty & Fairness, the light blue Daisy Petal named Lupe. Lupe the Lupine helped the girls understand why being honest and fair is important to friendship.
Our children need to learn to be honest with others...and with themselves. That's not an easy task. Teaching children Fairness is not any easier. Children will often cry out, "That's not fair," when things don't go the way they want them too.
However, it is important to teach our children why they should know the rules and follow them. It is also important to teach them ways to change those rules if they need to, and how to do so in a way that is "fair" to everyone involved.
In order to model honesty and fairness this weeks activities involved games and role-playing situations. To further help girls to develop ways to communicate their understanding, we participated in discussions, games such as; identifying a truth from a lie game (ex.. Bananas are purple), and creating a Lupe Puppet for role-playing.
Most of the girls in our troop are six-years-old (a few have turned seven). If we were dealing with younger Daisies, I might've approached this petal a little differently.
As it is, though, these girls have a pretty good grasp on what it means to be honest, and why it's important to tell the truth. Instead of reading The Boy Who Cried Wolf, which many sites suggest, I just asked the girls why they felt it was important to always be honest. They didn't need that story. They'd heard it before. Since honesty was something they had a good grasp on already, we spent the bulk of the meeting covering Fairness. But not in a way you might suspect. . . .
Many online sites suggest activities like giving the girls an unequal number of treats, then talking about being fair, and then giving a treat to those who were left out.
I wasn't comfortable with this for a number of reasons:
1. It makes some of the girls feel left out (rightfully so) from the get-go. To me, that's not ideal at this age.
2. It ties the concept of Fairness to material objects only. But being fair goes beyond things; I wanted to focus on actions (and perhaps more importantly, reactions) as well.
3. Sometimes things aren't fair, or sometimes they are, but they don't feel fair. I wanted to give the girls a way to respond in that situation.
After we finished talking about honesty, I stood in front of them and asked, "Has anyone here ever felt like something wasn't fair? Has anyone here ever done this?" and I stomped my foot, put my hands on my hips, and whined very loudly, "THAT'S NOT FAIR!" (I over-exaggerated, so it was a little funny, but at the same time, familiar. I'm pretty sure they've all done this. All kids at some point have. At least mine have.)
Then I said again, "Has anyone ever felt this way?" and I raised my hand to show I have.
Immediately the girls' hands shot up in the air.
I lowered my voice, almost to a whisper (this is a great trick -- they will be extra quiet to listen, in most cases) and said, "I'll tell you a secret . . . Girl Scouts don't do that."
They all stared at me.
I said, "Instead of stomping our feet and saying 'THAT'S NOT FAIR!' Girl Scouts stop and think of a way to make it feel fair."
Then I had two girls come up and asked them their favorite colors. One was purple; the other was gold. I gave a pretend example of what if the first one had a gold crayon and the second had a purple, and each wanted to use the other's crayon. Instead of saying "THAT'S NOT FAIR!" what could they do to make it fair?
My Daisies knew the answers immediately: "SHARE!" "TAKE TURNS!"
Yep. I reiterated Girl Scouts look for a solution to the problem. I also tried to let the girls come up with the answers themselves.
So while I wanted to introduce the concept of fairness beyond material things, I still had to use a scenario involving (imaginary) things to get the point across. But, my focus wasn't on everyone gets the same. My focus was on not whining about things feeling unfair, but acting on making them feel fair.
Our first craft was coloring and creating Lupe Puppet, because it tied into the role playing activity we were going to do after snack:
While they were coloring, I asked them to think about ways that they've experienced unfairness and how they could make it feel fair. 
After craft cleanup, we read them the Lupe story from the blue Daisy book. (Note: Lupe is pronounced "LOO-pay," and Lupine is pronounced "LOO-pin," because it's the flower/noun, not the adjective.) This is a cute little story and touches on both being fair, and being honest. Afterward we talked about what if Lupe had made different choices, and what that would mean, etc.
Circle Time Discussion:
Identify a truth from a lie (ex. Bananas are purple)
Discuss why honesty is a good value
Problem solve what they should do if they ever do tell a lie
Discuss what it means to be Fair
Problem solve what they can do if they see someone being treated unfairly
Discuss ways to be honest and fair to themselves.
After Circle Time Discussion we read another book:
Afterwards, we asked the girls to use their Lupe Puppets with each other to role play a time when something wasn’t fair, and how they can find a solution. The girls were eager to participate and had great ideas.
At the end, I had them all stand and say they promised to try very hard to always be Honest and Fair, as a Girl Scout should be. They did. And with that, they'd earned their petal. :)
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