Many girls choose to do retired badges as a way to fill in badges for their personal interests that don't have an equivalent current badge. Or, they're like my daughters and are overachievers or completionists. :) Adding retired badges in with the current line-up of badges doesn't always result in a uniform looking neat and orderly, but it does show a commitment to learning something from the older set of offerings. These pictures are just my picture-based notes about how we're incorporating the 2001 series of badges into my girls' Girl Scout experience.
The books from the 2001 series of retired badges look like this:
When my eldest daughter was a Brownie, she finished all of the current badges that our troop wasn't going to be doing and then begged for more things she could do. That's when we discovered the retired badges and went down the rabbit hole. I found 10 of them on a vest at Goodwill and carefully rescued them. We bought a used copy of the badge book and she had them all done in 2 weeks. Then she started looking at the other badges in the book and asked if we could find more of them. We ended up finding them all, and she got them all done before she finished her second year of Brownies. We had to utilize the back of her vest to get them to fit, but she was thrilled:
In Summer 2017, GSUSA released a whole bunch of new STEM-based badges and journeys. I figured there was no way to get all of that to fit plus still do the full set of retired, but that's what my younger daughter wanted to do. It's tight, but it was possible! She bridged before the 2019-2020 year and managed to get them all in!
My elder has continued this love of retired badges into her Junior level. We had a plan to get them all to fit, but it didn't survive that addition of all the STEM ones. She decided to move all the current badges to the journey side, and fill the flag side as far as it would go before overflowing to the sash.
The plan at Cadettes is to put all of the IPs onto a single sash, and split the levels into a Cadette only vest and a Senior/Ambassador combined vest. You can fit 84 IPs on a single sash if you put 39 on the front and 45 on the back. It still leaves room for the flag, council ID, and troop number.
They make me crazy with how much they want to do, but I'm really proud of them. <3
The books from the 2001 series of retired badges look like this:
- The Brownie Try-Its are the brown-bordered series and are completed by doing any 4 of the listed steps. There are 57 in this book. There were 2 more that were released as on-line only badges. Those online-only requirements were hard to track down because they were all removed from official Girl Scout sites when the current set of badge books came out, but I finally got them all. You can download them here: Online-Only Retired Brownie Badges
- The Junior Proficiency Badges are the green-bordered series and are completed by doing any 6 of the listed steps. There are 104 in this book. There were 11 more that were released as on-line only badges as well. You can download them here: Online-Only Retired Junior Badges
- The Cadette and Senior (and now Ambassador) Interest Projects are the blue-bordered series and are completed by doing 2 of the Skill Builder activities, 1 from each of the Technology/Service Project/Career Exploration categories, and then 2 additional activities from any section. There are 79 of them in this book. There was 1 more that was released as an on-line only badge as well. You can download it here: Online-Only Retired Interest Projects
When my eldest daughter was a Brownie, she finished all of the current badges that our troop wasn't going to be doing and then begged for more things she could do. That's when we discovered the retired badges and went down the rabbit hole. I found 10 of them on a vest at Goodwill and carefully rescued them. We bought a used copy of the badge book and she had them all done in 2 weeks. Then she started looking at the other badges in the book and asked if we could find more of them. We ended up finding them all, and she got them all done before she finished her second year of Brownies. We had to utilize the back of her vest to get them to fit, but she was thrilled:
In Summer 2017, GSUSA released a whole bunch of new STEM-based badges and journeys. I figured there was no way to get all of that to fit plus still do the full set of retired, but that's what my younger daughter wanted to do. It's tight, but it was possible! She bridged before the 2019-2020 year and managed to get them all in!
We found some council's own retired badges so she had a total of 127 retired ones to earn. We ended up putting 42 of the round proficiency badges and the 4 rectangular Signs on the flag side of her vest, 37 of the remaining retired proficiency badges on the front of an XL sash, and the last 48 on the back.
The plan at Cadettes is to put all of the IPs onto a single sash, and split the levels into a Cadette only vest and a Senior/Ambassador combined vest. You can fit 84 IPs on a single sash if you put 39 on the front and 45 on the back. It still leaves room for the flag, council ID, and troop number.
They make me crazy with how much they want to do, but I'm really proud of them. <3
