Meet My Customers - Brownie Badge

Our Brownie troop just earned their "Meet My Customers" badge.  This badge and it's activities are some what similar to the financial leaves for Daisy's.  Our girls earned their financial leaves during Daisy's, so some of these steps were quite easy and went rather quickly.

Steps:
1.  Find out where your customers are
2.  Talk to some Customers
3.  Practice handling money and making change
4.  Role playing and good customer relations
5.  Thank your customers

I know these might be out of order.  This is how we completed these steps in our meeting.  This did take us a couple of meetings, but, could possibly be done in one meeting.  (our meetings are one hour long)

As an opener, we printed out a little worksheet for the girls.  The girls had to fill in the cost for boxes of cookies (we went up to 12 cookies).

1 box ________
2 boxes_______
3 boxes_______
4 boxes_______

Our girls are in second grade and are learning word problems, so we put a few of our own on the worksheet.

Aunt Lisa bought 2 boxes of Samoas and 1 box of Savannah Smiles.  She hands you a $20 bill.  What is her change?

This made the girls think through the order and use their math skills.

(we did our attendance, pledge, promise and law at this point)

We talked to the girls about safety when selling Girl Scout Cookies (only go out with a parent, never go door-to-door by yourself).  Who can you sell to?  Neighbors, friends, family.  (we did not do booth sales this year, so we did not discuss)

I photocopied some money (nothing like printing your own money!)  (play money will work for this activity, too)  and gave each of the girls about $40.   (1) $20, (1) $10, (1) $5 and (4) $1's.  We had groups of two girls and they took turns being the buyer or the customer.  The girls practiced what to say when the door opened, "Hello, I'm selling Girl Scout Cookies...." and also what to say if a customer says No (Thank you).

The customer would place their order and the girl scout then figures out how much the customer owes them.  During this activity, we used the play money so the girls can give out the correct change.

At our next meeting, when the girls were handing in their cookie order forms*, we asked them what they wanted to do with their money that they earned selling Girl Scout Cookies.  They each wrote down 3 ideas.  As a sharing time activity we asked them to tell us their favorite idea.  We wrote them on the board and then had the girls vote on them. 

We had the girls write a thank you note to their customers.  Just one note, very general, thanking them for buying cookies.  They could add a picture if they wanted.  They could also tell their customers what we plan on doing with the money that we earned.  We collected the notes from the girls.  When the cookies arrived, we gave the "thank you notes" to the girls (and parents) and asked them to make copies to give to their customers with their orders.

*when the girls handed in their forms, we had them color in part of a thermometer that we drew.  We had our goal (this year was 500) and each girl colored in how many they sold.  Leave some extra space at the top.  We had to extend our thermometer because we sold over 700 boxes. 

Hope this helps.  If you have any ideas that you used, please share them!