Loyal Little Flowers

These ideas were developed by me for my local group and are not a part of the official Little Flowers Girls Club ® created by Rachel Watkins. To purchase the excellent materials and begin your own local group, please visit www.beholdpublications.com

This post is mostly for the benefit of all the girls who had to miss Friday's meeting (and received their materials in the mail), so no photos or file uploads (yet).

We had another great meeting! The parish where we normally meet was using all their meeting rooms, so we met at the home of one of the girls. Thanks for your generosity! It worked out really well, and the girls were thrilled to get to run around outside before and after the meeting and during snacktime!

Once I pulled them away from the great outdoors, we began in prayer. Instead of speaking right away to the girls about Loyalty, I decided to read them the story about St. Lucy in Sixty Saints for Girls, because I just love those stories SO much! We did talk about the many ways St. Lucy was loyal to her mother and to God.

We talked about to whom we can/should be loyal: friends, family, parents, siblings, schools, pets, religious communities, sports teams, stores, brand names, political candidates, Church, and most importantly God. We discussed what loyalty looks like, and I shared several examples of being loyal or disloyal. I shared how we have to choose carefully to whom or to what to be loyal, as we should not be loyal to those who do not deserve it. And, I tried to explain that being loyal does not mean we do not ever tell on another person. The girls seemed to understand that it is really important to tell an adult in certain circumstances, even if they were told not to do so by a friend or family member.

Then, I had the three rose groups go off to practice and then act out several stories from Bill Bennett's Book of Virtues and Moral Compass anthologies. A mom read the stories out loud for the youngest two groups as they performed, and the oldest group chose narrators to read their own. All groups chose to change the main character to girls instead of boys. :) The stories I chose were: "Hans the Shepherd Boy" (MC), "The Cap That Mother Made" (BoV), and "The Most Precious Thing" (MC). The oldest group had the last story, and they modified it to be two friends living together instead of husband and wife; it worked well!

I explained that our flower is the poppy and read the poem "In Flander's Field," and we talked about the loyalty of soldiers (more info here). This was in preparation for our craft, which we started after snack time. The girls made two poppies from Oriental Trading Company, which are very pretty when finished. On one flower, they put a note or drawing for a veteran to thank him/her for his/her service. I am going to mail these flowers to the VA hospital in town. (those of you who did the craft at home might want to pass along your extra poppies to a soldier or veteran in the family)

When the girls finished their craft, they immediately made their virtue pages (this was because during snack we moved tables into the main room for crafts). Then, we closed our meeting by singing the Scripture song, saying closing prayers, and distributing patches.

We only have one more meeting and then our end of wreath party! I cannot believe it has gone by so quickly! (but I'm pretty glad, as I have less and less energy these days!)