Basic Meeting Plans are designed to have minimal supplies and still hit the GSUSA Requirements. Most meetings can be done in a 90 minute time frame.
Items needed:
- Either real coins and bills you feel comfortable using (only allow them to handle $1s and $5s, even if you show them larger bills)
OR fake coins and paper money
(Note, troops with a larger budget might want to use the Money Mail Game by GSGCNWI as the practice portion of this basic plan or buy play money.)
Coins!
Info Needed: Every country has money, called currency. In U.S.A. we have coins and bills. The basic coins are: penny, nickel, dime, and quarter. Pennies are worth 1 cent. Nickels are worth 5 cents. Dimes are worth 10 cents. Quarters are worth 25 cents.
Fun Activity: Coin Sort – Have a pile of coins (fake or real) and have the scouts sort them into containers or a cupcake baking tin. Reenforce what they are worth as they are sorting and quiz them at the end to see if they remember the value of each coin.
Action Needed:
(Requirement 1 Earned – Fun Activity optional)
Bills!
Info Needed: U.S.A. bills are worth the number printed on them: $1, $5, $10, $20 and so on. But how much is one dollar? Is it the same as a penny which we know is worth 1? No. 100 pennies is how much $1 is. If we used dimes, which are worth 10 in coins, we would need 10 times. If we count by 10s, 10 dimes are 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100! 100 in coins equals $1.
Question Needed: How much would $5 be worth in coins?
Fun Activity: Mix and Match – Give each scout or small scout group a handful of random coins. Ask them if they can make $1 with what they have? (Since it is random, some might not have enough for $1, and that’s okay – tell them it’s part of the game and good job for counting and finding the clues to solve the mystery.)
(Requirement 2 Earned – Fun Activity optional)
Practice Using Money
Info Needed: We use money to buy things. But sometimes, the value isn’t the same as the money we have. If we wanted to buy a new fancy notebook, and it cost $1.75 – we only have $2. How do we pay? Is $2 more than $1.75? Yes! So we give the store our $2. But that’s more than the notebook costs. The store gives us a quarter back. How much is a quarter? 25. 75 plus 25 is? 100! $1.75 plus the 25 quarter is $2, just like what we gave the store. The quarter they gave back is called Change. When we buy things, the store gives us change when we give them too much.
Fun Activity: Pay the Store – Play pretend with the scouts. Let them have some coins and bills and keep some coins and bills. Set a timer and tell them how much a pretend item they need to buy is. Scouts hurry to find either the correct amount, or a little more (like the $2 was a little more than the cost of $1.75). Start the time when you tell them the item price. Stop the timer when they hand you the money. Count the amounts with the scouts and see if they succeeded or not. Give big claps if they did and give them back the right amount of change (having them help you count) if they paid more. See if they can do it again! If they didn’t succeed and gave too little, tell them not to worry, let’s try again.
(Requirement 3 Earned)
Meeting End
Scouts can keep playing rounds of Pay the Store until it’s time to go home.
General Notes
Note to Leaders – No Basic Plan compiled by The Badge Archive will earn multiple badges in one level. Part of being budget friendly is not costing more than the price of one official GSUSA badge per meeting.
Some badges will take two meetings to finish. This helps scouts enjoy activities and keeps the troop budget in mind by only needing one GSUSA badge for every two meetings. Troops may choose to get a fun patch for one of the meetings if scouts want a badge/patch for every meeting. Scouts can earn the fun patch if they only attend one meeting and get a fun patch and the official badge if they go to both.
The Badge Archive 