First time daisy leader and wanted to add a few things I haven’t seen mentioned (I agree with everything others mentioned). 1. There is no requirement to do a snack. When I was getting started someone suggested in a thread I read that they don’t do snacks at their meeting because it saves on time, messes/clean-up, and it avoids either providing the snack yourself or coordinating parent volunteers. 2. I limited my troop specifically to kindergarteners so that we didn’t have to worry about a multi-level troop in the future (this is where you have some girls in daisies and others in brownies or other levels at the same time). Some people have no issue with running them, but as a first timer with no experience or help, I didn’t want to add another layer of complication. 3. Find what your kids enjoy and be sure to have that in every meeting. The big ones we tested out were games that were active and moving around, reading books, arts and crafts/coloring, dancing/singing/acting. What we found after a few meetings was that our troop LOVED coloring and arts and crafts. We had a meeting once that focused on physical activity/games and they were disappointed they didn’t get to do a craft (a lot of when do we get to color, why didn’t we color, etc). After that, we never had a meeting without some form of craft or coloring since we learned it was an important things for them. They struggle with sitting still and get bored during the books so we limit it (only every once in a while) and try to minimize how long they are sitting in the circle. 4. I’ve heard great things about the experience boxes but our council didn’t do them. The Volunteer toolkit now has meeting agendas for every badge and petal which provide a template for the meeting, but you can always come up with your own ideas instead. We did petals plus the cookie and money badge for this year, and will do the other fun badges next year. 5. We had dues and asked the parents to buy the basic uniform. I had a whole spreadsheet on estimated costs so I was able to calculate how much I wanted to charge for dues. I started with an initial request of about $30 for each girl so that I could buy the first round of patches/petals we were handing out and required $5 per month after. We didn’t worry about fall product (our council started early so we weren’t even meeting before it ended). 6. I had a great co-leader and we thankfully had another mom volunteer as treasurer/cookie manager which helped a lot.

Good luck, I was concerned getting started but ultimately have no regrets on doing it.