Girl Scouts Bronze Award Ceremony Ideas

As you may remember, we have a love of Girl Scouts in this house! I have two girls. My oldest daughter, Snowflake is now a Cadette and my younger daughter, Pumpkin is a Daisy. I am currently the Daisy leader and I also help out our large multi-level troop in some other ways.

Last year our rather large Junior level earned their Bronze Award, but the paperwork was not completed in time for them to received their Bronze Awards at the End of the Year Ceremonies. Our main leader wanted to make sure we made their ceremony special. She asked for my help.

We had a bridging and re-dedication ceremony earlier this year for all the levels in our troop. At that ceremony, we also gave the Juniors (now Cadettes) their Bronze Awards. I’m sharing the things I made with you now because I thought it might come in handy as you begin to think about the end of the year and your own bridging and award ceremonies.

The first thing I came up with was to make some cute identification for each table where the girls would sit. We meet in an elementary school cafeteria. It is a large space. The girls know where to sit, but it never hurts to have something cute for a special night.

I decided on a color theme for our ceremony and went from there. Our color theme was green and pink.

I found these little bins in the dollar spot at Target. I needed to try to keep things inexpensive and reuseable so we would be using our resources wisely. I thought for a while about what would work to hold the decoration in place in the bin. I came up with the idea of using air dry clay. I bought one large tub of it and used it between the 5 different bins. I covered the air dry clay with torn up pieces of tissue paper matching the color theme.

Before you get to adding your air dry clay, make sure you have all your components ready to go because while it requires a while for complete drying, you don’t want to risk being unable to add your cuteness to your bin.

For each level, I used my Cricut(affiliate link) to cut out as large of a shape as I could get to fit on a 12×12 piece of scrapbook paper. I matched the shape to the shape of that levels badges. For the Daisy’s I tried to match the shape of the Daisy petals, but I also had to keep it wide enough to place the name of the level.

I also matched the color of the sign to the color of the official Girl Scout book for that level.

The Brownies got the familiar triangle shape and the brown.

For each level I added the name of that level cut out of white paper on the Cricut. The whole sign was adhered to a dowel rod. I used two signs so there wouldn’t be any ugly side and the dowel rod would be mostly covered.

The Juniors got the round shape of their badges with the purple of their book.

I made plenty of pom poms from leftover yarn I had for other projects. You might recongnize the green yarn from the Easter to Spring wreath I made last year. I glued them onto dowel rods. I purchased one package of dowel rods to complete everything for the decorations.

The Cadette level got a red diamond in honor of their badge shape and book color. I didn’t even notice, until I was writing this post, that I spelled their level wrong. Geez…I feel really badly about that. I will have to fix it before our next award ceremony.

I also color copied the Girl Scout themed circles you see on the dowel rods. I got those from Crissy’s Crafts: Girl Scouts Investiture Ceremony. She has them as a free download. Some of the files are editable so you can personalize them for your troop. A combination of pom poms and the Girl Scout themed circles were added to each decorative bin.

We have all levels in our troop. Our Senior and Ambassador levels are somewhat small and they sometimes sit together, especially at special ceremonies. I needed to save a little money, so I decided to combine their decorative bin together. I was able to place the Senior badge shape and color on one side and the Ambassador badge shape and color on the other side.

The decorative bins were finished off with the cute pink and green polka dot ribbon.

Next up, we wanted to give the Bronze Award recipients a little giftie, so I made these cute bags for each of them.

These bags were very inexpensive, plain white, and boring. I needed to add a bit of something to them. I got the pink Girl Scout Trefoil from that same download at Crissy’s Crafts and just enlarged it. I added the Bronze Award and Congrats(cut out on my Cricut) to the bags along with the same polka dot ribbon. I tied the ribbon in a simple knot to save money. For the 10 bags and 5 decorative signs, I only used 2 rolls of ribbon.

We planned to have cupcakes in celebration. I only had muffins on hand at home, so you get to see the cupcake decorations in muffins. More of those same Girl Scout themed circles were cut out and adhered to cake pop sticks. I put one on each side, so there wouldn’t be an ugly side.

Finally, at the ceremony, we added a balloon bridge. I had seen this idea on Pinterest. It was just a picture with no attribution, so I can’t send you to anyone to see more. We used one of each color of the rainbow and varied the height of the balloons so they would look like a bridge. I used blue painter’s tape to tape them to the floor. That way when we were done we wouldn’t have harmed any surface and could leave the school the same or better than we found it.

The balloon bridge was a huge hit. They were super easy to do and gives quite the visual impact. We just bought one of those helium tanks(affiliate link) you can buy at Target or other stores. It contained enough of each balloon color for this event. We plan to do this balloon bridge again and will need to buy some more colors for a second use. I think next time, we should make our bridge a bit lower as it was a little high and did obstruct some of the view from the rest of the room as well as some of the camera shots of the stage, but all in all it was fantastic!

Here is my cute Cadette with her new Cadette badge and vest. You can see her new Bronze award on her vest. She loved everything I did for the troop that night. Yay!

If you have a special ceremony or investiture coming up, all these ideas turned out so cute and really helped to make the Bronze Award, Bridging and Re-dedication ceremony quite special. They did take time, which I know is sometimes in short supply, but losing a couple of nights sleep was worth it to help the girls really celebrate their great achievement! Way to go to all 10 of the Juniors, now Cadettes, who earned their Bronze Awards! We are super proud of you!

Have you created a special ceremony for your troop? Do tell, I would love to hear and share more ideas.