I recently received this email from another leader, Cherie Cooper, with what I found to be helpful information for leaders at the Junior level. I have already started "Junior Notebooks" with my third graders so with her permission, I am posting her ideas, lightly edited, for everyone's benefit!

To add to her notes, there are attendance patches that you can award if you follow her pattern as outlined below. Enjoy!

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I myself am in my 5th month as a Junior Leader with 19 girls in our troops. Talk about crazy times. As your girls are getting ready to start, I thought I would share what my co-leaders and I are doing with our girls to keep them organized.

In 4th grade, they start to want and expect some additional responsibility. This year, we bought each girl a 1-inch white binder (the type with a clear cover you can insert a piece of paper underneath) We used brightly colored paper and came up with a border and printed our Troop number and each individual girl's name. For the back, we printed out a sheet of all our meetings and left a blank that said I am the meeting host on . We filled this in once the parents signed up to help with the meeting. That person also brings the snack for that day.

In the binder, we bought a set of 5 tabs. The first one has the troop roster. second one has their individual tracking sheet for badges earned. We also have a summary sheet that we use after each badge for them to take notes on what they did to earn the badge. They then have to take it home and review it with their parent and have them inital that they saw it. This has the kids talking to the parents about what we are doing and the girls have a refence when they want to
remember what they did to earn a certain badge.

We also included a one-page summary of each award they are working to earn (e.g., signs, junior aide patch) so that they have a quick refence of what needs to be done and a detailed 2-page sheet for tracking activities towards the Bronze award.

We are sisters to my other daughter's 3rd grade troop and the 3rd graders loved the binders so much they asked if they could get theres now so they can keep track of the bridging activties and get a jump start on next year. We also gave them notebook paper for taking notes and went to the dollar store and got pencil pouches to carry a pen and pencil.

We check the homework we send home and have been giving points for attendance - one for the scout, one for the binder, and one for the vest. It is working great and very rarely do we have someone forget their binder or vest. We have yet to decide how we are going to reward this attendance, but the girls just know they have to remember to bring their stuff. Hope you enjoy this idea, maybe your girls would enjoy it too.