Homeschool Scouts: American Heritage Girl Badges and Homeschooling

Boy Scouts who are homeschooled have a distinct advantage of being able to earn badges and cover important educational material at the same time. In fact, a series of badges can be combined to cover a course in science, social studies, language arts, and numerous electives. While girl scouts has an award system for different learning activities and goals, it take a bit more creativity to match up their award system to meet the goals of a homeschool curriculum. American Heritage Girls, however, does have a system much like Boy Scouts making it a great program for homeschooled girls.

American Heritage girls is a fairly new Christian organization, founded in 1995 due to to founders disappointments with some of the aspects of girl scouts. Like Boy Scouts American Heritage girl has a badge system that requires research, planning, and presentations to complete. Such a badge systems lends nicely to a homeschool learning environment.

You do need to be careful about what American Heritage Girl group you join as it is not quite as flexible as Boy Scouts. There is not a Lone Scout Program and some troups like everyone to work on the same badge at the same time. This makes structuring the badge earning process along with your educational process difficult. Still, if you can find a service oriented group that let's you earn badges at your own pace, then you will have a good match.

For illustration purposes, here is a sampling of what kind of badges are available, and where they may fit into your daughter's homeschool program.

For Social Studies, she might earn the Ancestor Detector, Citizenship and Government, Native American, Out Flag, Our Heritage, and World Heritage Badges.

For Science, she might earn the Aviation, Geology, Kitchen Scientist, Space Exploration, Women Inventors, Young Meteorologist, and Zoology Badges.

For Computers and Internet, she can earn the Computer Fun and Internet Adventure badges.

For health she might earn the Emergency Preparedness, Fire Safety and Fire Building, and Personal Hygiene badges.

For Home Economics she might earn the Cake Decorating, Cooking, Family Helper, Gardening, Home Care & Repair, Home Decorating, Memory Maker, Money Management, Pet Care, and Sewing badges.

For Arts she might earn the Cinematography, Creative Crafts, Creative Writing, Dance, Music Appreciation, Music Performance, Needle Arts, Photography, Puppetry, Textile Arts, and Theater badges.

For Health, she might earn the Archery, Camping, Canoeing, Cycling, Fishing, Golf, Hiking, Horsemanship, Nature & Wildlife, Outdoor Cooking, Outdoor Skills, Snow Skiing & Snowboarding, and Swimming badges.

This is just a sampling of what is available. To find out more about what badges are available through American Heritage Girls, you will need to join a troop and/or possibly purchase badge materials.