21/03/19
This evening we did the fifth and final part of the two Skills Builders we have been working on, Innovate and Lead Stage 2. The girls who were doing Lead did "Design Time" and the girls doing Innovate did "Made to Measure". I was with the Lead group. Our task was to create a zoo. The girls first had to think of 5 animals that they would like to put in their zoo, on their own. We provided lots of books on animals to give them some ideas and they could be as rare and unique as they wanted (we even had a few dragons!). I then paired the girls up by pulling names out of a hat. In their pairs they had to create their zoo but there was only space for 5 animals. They had to discuss which animals they would like and why. Finally, the pairs had to join up into 4s and do the same thing again so they were left wth 5 animals from the 20 each 4 would have started with. I had an odd number of pairs so I had one group with 3 pairs in who were allowed 7 animals in their zoo instead. Once they had narrowed down their choice, they could draw a picture of their zoo and give it a name. I was quite impressed with most of the girls - when narrowing down their animals, lots of them said they could each choose 2 and then the 5th one would be a joint decision, and the same happened when they got into bigger groups - they all chose 1 and the last one was a group decision. That was a suggestions written on the card but we stopped giving the girls the card as it just caused confusion so I was quite proud that they came up with that idea all by themselves!
The group doing Innovate were making sponge boats. We had bought lots of the scourer sponges (the yellow ones with a rough green side) and the girls could make a sail for their boat which was stuck on a cocktail stick in the sponge. They then had a straw and they blew their boat in a tub of water. We measured the distance that it travelled 3 times and they worked out the average (we provided calculators!). They could then look at the boats that went the furthest and redesign their sail based on the best ones.
Once we had finished the activities, we all sat in a Brownie circle and the Lead girls showed the pictures of their zoo and explained what animals they had in them. The girls who had been doing Innovate then voted on what they thought was the best zoo. We then handed out the badges to those girls who had been at all 5 meetings. We had 17 of our 26 girls get a badge. Of those who didn't get a badge, 5 were new starters who joined after we started and the other 4 have only missed 1 meeting each. We have told those girls that we are going to do a catch up session soon and that we haven't forgotten about them! This was quite a good evening, and I was very surprised that my group got along without arguments this week! Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that we muddled them up and they weren't working with their friends for once.
Showing posts with label skills for my future theme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skills for my future theme. Show all posts
Monday, 25 March 2019
Monday, 18 February 2019
Skills Builders Part 4
14/02/19
This week we continued with the 2 Skills Builders we have been working towards - we are now on activity 4 of 5. The girls doing Lead were teaching each other dance moves, and the girls doing Innovate were building towers from fruit and veg. I was assisting the girls doing Lead. They had to split into 4 teams (ours had 3/4 girls in each). They had to choose a song in their team and then each come up with 2 dance moves to it. They had to teach their dance moves to the rest of their team and then combine them all into a routine which they then performed. We had a wide range of songs, from A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman, to Katy Perry's Firework - all of which were sung by the girls as they performed because we had no way to play a recording. The girls worked pretty well in their teams, although we had one that split into two because they couldn't decide on a song. They didn't fully grasp the concept of all choosing moves so one of the groups had the older girl teach the two younger ones a routine to a song she knew instead. As leaders, we had to observe the groups and award each team one of 4 awards:
The girls doing Innovate were first given slices of various fruits and veg and asked to try and build the tallest tower they could with them. When they started struggling a bit, they were then given large slices of apples and cocktail sticks - the foundations and support beams - and then they could try again. The aim was to try and show them why buildings don't fall over, although we found that the girls didn't really care about the specifics, they just wanted to build towers and then eat the food! We had some quite impressive structures by the end though:
Once we had finished, we then played 2 games of Pirates before doing the Brownie circle and sending the girls home. This meeting was fairly laid back as we did not have to plan too much. The girls also seemed to enjoy the activity they were doing, and we had very few girls ask if they could swap to the other one.
Next week is half term so I am taking week off from blogging (so I can focus on finalising things for our Thinking Day trip in a few weeks!).
This week we continued with the 2 Skills Builders we have been working towards - we are now on activity 4 of 5. The girls doing Lead were teaching each other dance moves, and the girls doing Innovate were building towers from fruit and veg. I was assisting the girls doing Lead. They had to split into 4 teams (ours had 3/4 girls in each). They had to choose a song in their team and then each come up with 2 dance moves to it. They had to teach their dance moves to the rest of their team and then combine them all into a routine which they then performed. We had a wide range of songs, from A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman, to Katy Perry's Firework - all of which were sung by the girls as they performed because we had no way to play a recording. The girls worked pretty well in their teams, although we had one that split into two because they couldn't decide on a song. They didn't fully grasp the concept of all choosing moves so one of the groups had the older girl teach the two younger ones a routine to a song she knew instead. As leaders, we had to observe the groups and award each team one of 4 awards:
- Leadership Star: for the team that gives the best directions to each other
- Teamwork Champions: for the team that works the best together
- Top Encouragers: for the team that's most encouraging towards each other
- Best Listeners: for the team that listened best to each other
The girls doing Innovate were first given slices of various fruits and veg and asked to try and build the tallest tower they could with them. When they started struggling a bit, they were then given large slices of apples and cocktail sticks - the foundations and support beams - and then they could try again. The aim was to try and show them why buildings don't fall over, although we found that the girls didn't really care about the specifics, they just wanted to build towers and then eat the food! We had some quite impressive structures by the end though:
Once we had finished, we then played 2 games of Pirates before doing the Brownie circle and sending the girls home. This meeting was fairly laid back as we did not have to plan too much. The girls also seemed to enjoy the activity they were doing, and we had very few girls ask if they could swap to the other one.
Next week is half term so I am taking week off from blogging (so I can focus on finalising things for our Thinking Day trip in a few weeks!).
Monday, 28 January 2019
Skills Builders Part III
24/01/19
This evening we started off by naming our new Polar Bear who arrived a few weeks ago. We wrote all the suggested names on pieces of paper and spread them out around the room on chairs. Each girl was then given 2 tokens with which to vote for her favourite. Once everyone had voted, we removed the names which got no or very few votes and everyone took back their 2 tokens and voted again. This time there was a very clear winner so we accepted it as his name - Snowy. If the votes had been more spread out, we would have removed the lower few again and repeated until a winner was found.
Now we had named our polar bear, the 5 new girls were given the opportunity to choose which of our two Skills Builders groups they wanted to join. I then took the Innovate group and we did the 'I Have an Idea' activity. We started off with Kim's game - we had a variety of different items which we hid under a blanket. We then uncovered the items and the girls had 30 seconds to look at them all and remember as many as they could. They then had to go and write down all the ones they could remember in small groups. We then came back to the pile and went through all the different items. I was quite impressed - one group managed to get 16 of the 17 items! The girls then split off into their groups again and thought of an invention they wanted to make. They had to draw a picture of their idea, label it, and give it a name. We had varying degrees of success with that activity - one group, with the help of the Young Leader, came up with a hob which you could set a maximum temperature for an it would turn off if it went over that temperature, so your food didn't bubble over. The second group designed a robot that would do anything you asked it to. They ended up with 4 slightly different designs of the same thing, as each girl wanted to do it 'her way'! The third and final group ended up with 3 completely different inventions - a pizza maker, a toy maker, and a tree house maker. We then had all the girls present their ideas to the rest of the groups and then we voted on the girls favourite one - this time they had 3 tokens and placed them on the ideas they thought were the best. The winner, by 1 point, was the pizza maker, followed by the hob.
The Lead group were doing the 'Leader Goals' card. They had to think of all the qualities a good leader should have and then think about a role model (real or fictional) who was a good leader. They had to draw a picture of them and write all their leadership traits around them. They then had to draw a picture of themselves and write their leadership traits around their picture. Finally, they had to compare the role model with themselves and see where they could improve to become a better leader.
The girls all seemed to enjoy this evening, although the girls who chose Innovate back when we chose got the better deal tonight in my opinion. I think the activity the Lead girls were doing was by far the least interesting of the 5 but at least they have got it out the way and can have fun for the remaining sessions.
This evening we started off by naming our new Polar Bear who arrived a few weeks ago. We wrote all the suggested names on pieces of paper and spread them out around the room on chairs. Each girl was then given 2 tokens with which to vote for her favourite. Once everyone had voted, we removed the names which got no or very few votes and everyone took back their 2 tokens and voted again. This time there was a very clear winner so we accepted it as his name - Snowy. If the votes had been more spread out, we would have removed the lower few again and repeated until a winner was found.
Now we had named our polar bear, the 5 new girls were given the opportunity to choose which of our two Skills Builders groups they wanted to join. I then took the Innovate group and we did the 'I Have an Idea' activity. We started off with Kim's game - we had a variety of different items which we hid under a blanket. We then uncovered the items and the girls had 30 seconds to look at them all and remember as many as they could. They then had to go and write down all the ones they could remember in small groups. We then came back to the pile and went through all the different items. I was quite impressed - one group managed to get 16 of the 17 items! The girls then split off into their groups again and thought of an invention they wanted to make. They had to draw a picture of their idea, label it, and give it a name. We had varying degrees of success with that activity - one group, with the help of the Young Leader, came up with a hob which you could set a maximum temperature for an it would turn off if it went over that temperature, so your food didn't bubble over. The second group designed a robot that would do anything you asked it to. They ended up with 4 slightly different designs of the same thing, as each girl wanted to do it 'her way'! The third and final group ended up with 3 completely different inventions - a pizza maker, a toy maker, and a tree house maker. We then had all the girls present their ideas to the rest of the groups and then we voted on the girls favourite one - this time they had 3 tokens and placed them on the ideas they thought were the best. The winner, by 1 point, was the pizza maker, followed by the hob.
The Lead group were doing the 'Leader Goals' card. They had to think of all the qualities a good leader should have and then think about a role model (real or fictional) who was a good leader. They had to draw a picture of them and write all their leadership traits around them. They then had to draw a picture of themselves and write their leadership traits around their picture. Finally, they had to compare the role model with themselves and see where they could improve to become a better leader.
The girls all seemed to enjoy this evening, although the girls who chose Innovate back when we chose got the better deal tonight in my opinion. I think the activity the Lead girls were doing was by far the least interesting of the 5 but at least they have got it out the way and can have fun for the remaining sessions.
Monday, 14 January 2019
First Meeting Back - Life Skills
10/01/19
Tonight was our first meeting back after Christmas. We had 5 new girls down to start tonight, 4 of which came (the last was ill). It was quite a challenge to remember all of their names, especially when 2 of them were already in uniform - one is a transfer and another has taken the place of her sister so is wearing her old uniform! They all got stuck in quite quickly though, and joined in the slightly crazy game of tag going on before we started.
Our first order of business was the introduction of our new sponsored animal - the polar bear. Before the summer (while I was away), the girls had raised money for Winston's Wish and WWF and we had then voted to sponsor a polar bear. We had sent the money off and, over Christmas, the polar bear toy came. However, all the other animals we have sponsored have come with a name, but the polar bear's certificate just said 'Thank you for sponsoring the Svalbard Polar Bears' so we asked the girls for suggestions for his name and we will vote (again!) in 2 weeks. We had lots of suggestions, including 'Fluffy', 'Snowball', and 'Misty' and now we need to work out the fairest way of voting for the winning name.
We then started by playing a nice running around game, to try and burn off some of the girls energy! We bought out a game we haven't played for a long while, so long so that it doesn't feature in my blog! Split the unit roughly into 3 and have the three groups line up against the wall, one behind the other. The leaders throw 4 or 5 bouncy balls from behind the girls at the wall opposite and the front row of girls run after them and try and catch them. All those girls then line up behind the rest of the unit and the girls who caught a ball can then throw it for the next group. Keep cycling through until you are bored! Our girls find it really fun, although we did learn the hard way that clear bouncy balls are not a great idea, especially when you have a girl with limited peripheral vision... Lesson learnt for next time though! When we stopped and asked for the balls in though, there was one missing so all the girls went running around looking under all the chairs but it was no where to be seen.
Now the girls had burnt off all their energy, we split into two groups to do some Skills for my Future Unit Meeting Activities. Half the girls did the 'In a Fix' one, and the other half did 'Coin Hunt' and then they swapped over. The girls doing 'In a Fix' were provided with some screws and nails, and some polystyrene boxes saved from Christmas presents. The two leaders with them supervised each girl hammering a nail and screwing a screw into the boxes. The girls were then allowed to practice more with the rest of the screws and nails. I ran the 'Coin Hunt' one - I split the girls into two teams, trying to get them split pretty evenly by age. I gave each group one of each coin (plastic ones bought on Amazon, including the new pound coin) and got them to line them up in order from smallest value to largest. All the girls did very well at that, and I then got them to tell me what values each coin was. A few of them tripped up after 1p and 2p and said 3p! We got a few giggles out of that. I then tipped the coins in a heap at one end of the hall (we decided hiding them around the hall was way too convoluted and we would just end up losing coins). I shouted out an amount to the girls and they had to run to the pile, one at a time, and get a coin until they had made the amount needed. I started off with some simple amounts, like 11p or £1.50 and then slowly increased the difficulty unti we were doing ones such as £1.89, and £3.52. We had a couple of confusions between 1p and 2p coins, but other than that I was very impressed by the girls ability to do mental maths, especially some of the younger girls.
Once the girls had had a chance to do both of the activities, we tidied up the bits of polystyrene from all over the floor and then it was time to hand out the various toys and some new sixer and seconder badges. In the process of tidying up, the lost bouncy ball made a reappearance too, apparently it "just rolled across the floor"... This was one of the better 'new programme' meetings we have done and the girls seemed to really enjoy all of it.
Tonight was our first meeting back after Christmas. We had 5 new girls down to start tonight, 4 of which came (the last was ill). It was quite a challenge to remember all of their names, especially when 2 of them were already in uniform - one is a transfer and another has taken the place of her sister so is wearing her old uniform! They all got stuck in quite quickly though, and joined in the slightly crazy game of tag going on before we started.
Our first order of business was the introduction of our new sponsored animal - the polar bear. Before the summer (while I was away), the girls had raised money for Winston's Wish and WWF and we had then voted to sponsor a polar bear. We had sent the money off and, over Christmas, the polar bear toy came. However, all the other animals we have sponsored have come with a name, but the polar bear's certificate just said 'Thank you for sponsoring the Svalbard Polar Bears' so we asked the girls for suggestions for his name and we will vote (again!) in 2 weeks. We had lots of suggestions, including 'Fluffy', 'Snowball', and 'Misty' and now we need to work out the fairest way of voting for the winning name.
We then started by playing a nice running around game, to try and burn off some of the girls energy! We bought out a game we haven't played for a long while, so long so that it doesn't feature in my blog! Split the unit roughly into 3 and have the three groups line up against the wall, one behind the other. The leaders throw 4 or 5 bouncy balls from behind the girls at the wall opposite and the front row of girls run after them and try and catch them. All those girls then line up behind the rest of the unit and the girls who caught a ball can then throw it for the next group. Keep cycling through until you are bored! Our girls find it really fun, although we did learn the hard way that clear bouncy balls are not a great idea, especially when you have a girl with limited peripheral vision... Lesson learnt for next time though! When we stopped and asked for the balls in though, there was one missing so all the girls went running around looking under all the chairs but it was no where to be seen.
Now the girls had burnt off all their energy, we split into two groups to do some Skills for my Future Unit Meeting Activities. Half the girls did the 'In a Fix' one, and the other half did 'Coin Hunt' and then they swapped over. The girls doing 'In a Fix' were provided with some screws and nails, and some polystyrene boxes saved from Christmas presents. The two leaders with them supervised each girl hammering a nail and screwing a screw into the boxes. The girls were then allowed to practice more with the rest of the screws and nails. I ran the 'Coin Hunt' one - I split the girls into two teams, trying to get them split pretty evenly by age. I gave each group one of each coin (plastic ones bought on Amazon, including the new pound coin) and got them to line them up in order from smallest value to largest. All the girls did very well at that, and I then got them to tell me what values each coin was. A few of them tripped up after 1p and 2p and said 3p! We got a few giggles out of that. I then tipped the coins in a heap at one end of the hall (we decided hiding them around the hall was way too convoluted and we would just end up losing coins). I shouted out an amount to the girls and they had to run to the pile, one at a time, and get a coin until they had made the amount needed. I started off with some simple amounts, like 11p or £1.50 and then slowly increased the difficulty unti we were doing ones such as £1.89, and £3.52. We had a couple of confusions between 1p and 2p coins, but other than that I was very impressed by the girls ability to do mental maths, especially some of the younger girls.
Once the girls had had a chance to do both of the activities, we tidied up the bits of polystyrene from all over the floor and then it was time to hand out the various toys and some new sixer and seconder badges. In the process of tidying up, the lost bouncy ball made a reappearance too, apparently it "just rolled across the floor"... This was one of the better 'new programme' meetings we have done and the girls seemed to really enjoy all of it.
Monday, 19 November 2018
More Skills Builders
15/11/18
This week we started by playing one of the games the girls had created a few weeks ago but didn't have time to play that week. This game involved having a group of girls in the middle as chasers, and the rest of the girls split into 4 corners. Each corner chose a name and then the girls in the middle would name 2 corners and an action. The two corners had to swap places while doing the action and the girls in the middle had to try and catch them while also doing the action. If a girl was caught then she became a chaser and the girl who caught her went into her corner instead. Actions that they chose included 'hopping', 'jogging', 'hopscotch', and 'walking'. We played the game for 5 minutes and then stopped the girls as there was no way the game would end otherwise!
We then split the girls into their skills builder groups and did another activity towards the skills builders. The group doing Lead did Change The Rules and the group doing Innovate did Move and Shake. The group doing Lead split into 2 smaller groups and each came up with a game that they were going to change the rules to. They had to write down the rules of the game they had chosen and then, in pairs, chose one rule to change. Each pair could then teach the rest of the group how to play their variation of the game. In the group that are doing Lead, there is one sixer so she sort of took charge of instructing both subgroups. At one point, when neither group was paying any attention to her at all, she just looked at me and said 'how do you do it?'! One subgroup chose Sleeping Lions and the other chose Wink Murder. The group who chose Wink Murder were then getting on fairly fine with changing one rule, but the group doing Sleeping Lions didn't really understand (they were a younger group of girls). They ended up playing a game they called Sleeping Narwhals (one girl had a Narwhal toy with her!) but that was where the similarities to Sleeping Lions stopped! I ended up having to intervene and re-explain the instructions to them. They then came up with a pretty clever rule change which sort of combined Sleeping Lions with Musical Statues and Musical Bumps. All the girls started off curled up on the floor, as if they were asleep and one girl left the room and counted to 10 (quietly). All the other girls could get up and dance around as much as they liked while she was out but as soon as she opened the door, they had to be curled up asleep again. Any girls who were spotted moving when the door was opened joined the girl outside. This led to a hilarious moment at the end of the meeting, when we let them run it with the whole pack, when the double doors swung open slowly to reveal half our unit stood the other side!
The group doing Innovate also split into two smaller groups. They had to choose a dance which had actions. They then had to write the actions on pieces of paper, with the body part on one colour and the motion on another colour. For example, they might write 'left hand' on white paper and 'on head' on yellow paper. They then had to mix up all the actions and pair them up randomly and then attempt the new dance. The idea behind this is it introduces them to computer algorithms. A computer will do the instructions you give it in the exact order you give them in, so if you accidentally get the instruction in the wrong order then the computer will do something silly. One group decided to do the Macarena and at one point ended up with 'hips on head' (from 'hips - rotate' and 'left hand on head') which caused a lot of giggles. At the end of the meeting, we let both groups perform their new dances to the rest of the unit. One group had decided prior to performing what order they were going to do their moves in whereas the other group made it up on the fly as they had 2 girls in the group who didn't want to perform. These two girls stood behind the audience, one with the yellow paper and one with the white and called out different moves for them to do. Both approaches worked well and it was nice to see the girls take a bit of initiative when they had member who didn't want to do it exactly as stated.
This was a tricky evening from a leaders perspective as the girls all needed a lot of help understanding the instructions and we had to guide them a lot more than we anticipated. The girls all seemed to have a fairly good time doing the activities though so I think we'll mark those two as a semi-success. I was also pretty impressed with the Sleeping Narwhals game, once I had intervened to get them on the right track.
This week we started by playing one of the games the girls had created a few weeks ago but didn't have time to play that week. This game involved having a group of girls in the middle as chasers, and the rest of the girls split into 4 corners. Each corner chose a name and then the girls in the middle would name 2 corners and an action. The two corners had to swap places while doing the action and the girls in the middle had to try and catch them while also doing the action. If a girl was caught then she became a chaser and the girl who caught her went into her corner instead. Actions that they chose included 'hopping', 'jogging', 'hopscotch', and 'walking'. We played the game for 5 minutes and then stopped the girls as there was no way the game would end otherwise!
We then split the girls into their skills builder groups and did another activity towards the skills builders. The group doing Lead did Change The Rules and the group doing Innovate did Move and Shake. The group doing Lead split into 2 smaller groups and each came up with a game that they were going to change the rules to. They had to write down the rules of the game they had chosen and then, in pairs, chose one rule to change. Each pair could then teach the rest of the group how to play their variation of the game. In the group that are doing Lead, there is one sixer so she sort of took charge of instructing both subgroups. At one point, when neither group was paying any attention to her at all, she just looked at me and said 'how do you do it?'! One subgroup chose Sleeping Lions and the other chose Wink Murder. The group who chose Wink Murder were then getting on fairly fine with changing one rule, but the group doing Sleeping Lions didn't really understand (they were a younger group of girls). They ended up playing a game they called Sleeping Narwhals (one girl had a Narwhal toy with her!) but that was where the similarities to Sleeping Lions stopped! I ended up having to intervene and re-explain the instructions to them. They then came up with a pretty clever rule change which sort of combined Sleeping Lions with Musical Statues and Musical Bumps. All the girls started off curled up on the floor, as if they were asleep and one girl left the room and counted to 10 (quietly). All the other girls could get up and dance around as much as they liked while she was out but as soon as she opened the door, they had to be curled up asleep again. Any girls who were spotted moving when the door was opened joined the girl outside. This led to a hilarious moment at the end of the meeting, when we let them run it with the whole pack, when the double doors swung open slowly to reveal half our unit stood the other side!
The group doing Innovate also split into two smaller groups. They had to choose a dance which had actions. They then had to write the actions on pieces of paper, with the body part on one colour and the motion on another colour. For example, they might write 'left hand' on white paper and 'on head' on yellow paper. They then had to mix up all the actions and pair them up randomly and then attempt the new dance. The idea behind this is it introduces them to computer algorithms. A computer will do the instructions you give it in the exact order you give them in, so if you accidentally get the instruction in the wrong order then the computer will do something silly. One group decided to do the Macarena and at one point ended up with 'hips on head' (from 'hips - rotate' and 'left hand on head') which caused a lot of giggles. At the end of the meeting, we let both groups perform their new dances to the rest of the unit. One group had decided prior to performing what order they were going to do their moves in whereas the other group made it up on the fly as they had 2 girls in the group who didn't want to perform. These two girls stood behind the audience, one with the yellow paper and one with the white and called out different moves for them to do. Both approaches worked well and it was nice to see the girls take a bit of initiative when they had member who didn't want to do it exactly as stated.
This was a tricky evening from a leaders perspective as the girls all needed a lot of help understanding the instructions and we had to guide them a lot more than we anticipated. The girls all seemed to have a fairly good time doing the activities though so I think we'll mark those two as a semi-success. I was also pretty impressed with the Sleeping Narwhals game, once I had intervened to get them on the right track.
Monday, 8 October 2018
First Skills Builder
04/10/18
This week we decided to bite the bullet and start one of the Skills Builders. The girls had all voted in a previous week so we first got the girls who hadn't been there that week to vote for which one they wanted to do. We then reminded the girls which one they had voted for and got them into the two groups. One group were doing the Rope Race from the Lead Skills Builder and the others were doing Mime Time from the Innovate Skills Builder. We copied the instructions from the card onto paper which we gave to the older girls in each group and let them get on with it themselves.
We milled around a bit and supervised, which ended up consisting mainly of bickering mitigation for the Lead group. They had sort of split into two groups and were making an obstacle course from tables and chairs but some of them had mis-understood the instructions and were using the skipping ropes as obstacles instead of holding onto them. We stepped in, paused what they were doing, and explained it to all of them. Once they understood, things went a little smoother, although we then had the problem of them not working well as a team - the one at the front was going too fast, and moaning at the one at the back for pulling on the rope too much. They did eventually get round the obstacle course a few different ways with different people at the front so we considered the section completed!
The other group did far better. We had gathered a random assortment of items, including plant pots, frisbees, a stick, a roll of packing tape, a scarf, and some half done knitting we found in cupboard. The girls then had to choose an object and mime it being something that it wasn't for the other girls to guess (the example on the cards is an umbrella being a walking stick). The girls spent some time playing around with a few items and deciding what they wanted to do and then our YL stepped in and got them sat down in a circle so they could all mime their object for the rest of the group to guess. Brown Owl and I were focussing all our attention on the Lead group and turned round to check the other group were still OK and were pleasantly surprised! They had finished a bit earlier than the Lead group so our YL had decided to play the Iranian Smiling Game with them, from last week. She is an ex-Brownie so we trust her but it's nice to see her leadership skills coming out a bit more each week.
We then did a bit more of the Century Time Travel UMA - this week we did the part about naming birds, flowers or trees. We stood the girls in a circle and went round it getting them to name one from any of the 3 categories, but it had to be one that no one else had said. I was very surprised at how well the girls did with this. You often hear people bemoaning the fact that children these days spend all their time on phones inside and don't know anything about the outdoors but our girls named some very obscure birds (including a Crested Pigeon and a Blue Footed Boobie - which got a lot of giggles). We also discussed the Health Rules that girls lived by 100 years ago:
“ Only feed on wholesome fare, Through your nostrils breathe fresh air,
We read out each of the 4 sections and got the girls to think about what it might mean and then explained it to them. We got lots of giggles when we explained the third line - it used to be thought that you should poo once a day to be healthy (clean inside)! When we said the last line, the girls all shouted "Excercise!", jumped up and started running manically around the hall in circles! Brown Owl looked at me and raised her eyebrows and then said she had an idea. She yelled "Pirates are Coming!!" and all the girls scattered and hid under the chairs around the room. A couple then came out and looked a bit confused and said "wait, we weren't playing Pirates...". Brown Owl laughed and said "I know, I just wanted you to stop running and listen! We then let the girls actually play Pirates to burn off the excess energy they had in their system!
It was then time to say goodbye to the girls and for us Leaders to empty the cupboard of all the things we need for pack holiday this weekend. It always surprises us how much stuff we end up taking with us... I'm hoping that I will manage to get the Pack Holiday blogs up fairly quickly after this weekend, but that all depends on the amount of sleep I get and whether I catch the cold that Brown Owl has (or one from any of the girls)...
This week we decided to bite the bullet and start one of the Skills Builders. The girls had all voted in a previous week so we first got the girls who hadn't been there that week to vote for which one they wanted to do. We then reminded the girls which one they had voted for and got them into the two groups. One group were doing the Rope Race from the Lead Skills Builder and the others were doing Mime Time from the Innovate Skills Builder. We copied the instructions from the card onto paper which we gave to the older girls in each group and let them get on with it themselves.
We milled around a bit and supervised, which ended up consisting mainly of bickering mitigation for the Lead group. They had sort of split into two groups and were making an obstacle course from tables and chairs but some of them had mis-understood the instructions and were using the skipping ropes as obstacles instead of holding onto them. We stepped in, paused what they were doing, and explained it to all of them. Once they understood, things went a little smoother, although we then had the problem of them not working well as a team - the one at the front was going too fast, and moaning at the one at the back for pulling on the rope too much. They did eventually get round the obstacle course a few different ways with different people at the front so we considered the section completed!
The other group did far better. We had gathered a random assortment of items, including plant pots, frisbees, a stick, a roll of packing tape, a scarf, and some half done knitting we found in cupboard. The girls then had to choose an object and mime it being something that it wasn't for the other girls to guess (the example on the cards is an umbrella being a walking stick). The girls spent some time playing around with a few items and deciding what they wanted to do and then our YL stepped in and got them sat down in a circle so they could all mime their object for the rest of the group to guess. Brown Owl and I were focussing all our attention on the Lead group and turned round to check the other group were still OK and were pleasantly surprised! They had finished a bit earlier than the Lead group so our YL had decided to play the Iranian Smiling Game with them, from last week. She is an ex-Brownie so we trust her but it's nice to see her leadership skills coming out a bit more each week.
We then did a bit more of the Century Time Travel UMA - this week we did the part about naming birds, flowers or trees. We stood the girls in a circle and went round it getting them to name one from any of the 3 categories, but it had to be one that no one else had said. I was very surprised at how well the girls did with this. You often hear people bemoaning the fact that children these days spend all their time on phones inside and don't know anything about the outdoors but our girls named some very obscure birds (including a Crested Pigeon and a Blue Footed Boobie - which got a lot of giggles). We also discussed the Health Rules that girls lived by 100 years ago:
“ Only feed on wholesome fare, Through your nostrils breathe fresh air,
Clean yourself both in and out, Twist and turn and run about. ”
It was then time to say goodbye to the girls and for us Leaders to empty the cupboard of all the things we need for pack holiday this weekend. It always surprises us how much stuff we end up taking with us... I'm hoping that I will manage to get the Pack Holiday blogs up fairly quickly after this weekend, but that all depends on the amount of sleep I get and whether I catch the cold that Brown Owl has (or one from any of the girls)...
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