Tunnelling

07/06/18

This week we went to the local Guiding headquarters to go grass sledging and tunneling. Unfortunately, it started raining as we left to go up there so we couldn't grass sledge as the brakes would not work on wet grass. Instead, we just did the tunnels with all the girls at once, instead of half and half.

We met the girls in the car park and then walked up the hill to the tunnels, which luckily are under a giant tree so the leaders don't get soaked while the girls are in them! We made a pile of water bottles and some leaders went round removing the plastic stoppers from the ends of all the tunnels which keep animals out. We then did a quick safety brief for the girls: essentially, which holes were the entrances to each tunnel system, and that we had head torches and knee pads if they needed them. There are three tunnel systems here, one is a simple straight line where you can see the other end which most of the girls go through first, to get a feel for what the tunnels are like inside. There is then one which is like a lowercase letter 'h' with a bit of a bend in the left hand leg so you can't see any exits when you go in. The final one has about 6 exits and part of it goes round in a circle so the girls can really explore.

Small tunnel system

Loop of large tunnel system

We then started handing out head torches. There are not enough for all the girls to have one, so we said they should line up at the entrance to the tunnel they wanted to go in and anyone who had just come out of a tunnel had to go and give their torch to someone at the front of a line. Some of the girls decided that they didn't want to wait for torches and they would go in without one.

I spent most of my time stood near the entrances, making sure there were no arguments about the torches, and that girls weren't left waiting for too long. We then had the problem that the torches were running out of batteries so Brown Owl went to find the organiser to get some more. She came back with a box of 48 so we were set then!

One of the girls came over to me part way through and said that people kept getting stuck in a dead end and were scared so I asked her to take me to the dead end because we were pretty sure there weren't any. We climbed over the tunnels to a point where a tunnel seemed to disappear into the nettles at the endge of the field. I was explaining to the girl that even if there was supposed to be a way out, they wouldn't want come out of it or they would get stung when I realised that it actually did a 90 degree left turn so we followed it a bit more and lo and behold, there was still a stopper on the end! I took it off and let the girls know that there was no longer a dead end!

A bit later, I caught site of some girls playing next to an exit, and then a small flash of something black rolling. I headed over there quickly, confusing Brown Owl as I thrust spare batteries back in her hand and disappeared at speed! As I came out from under the trees, I realised that some of the older girls were attempting to roll one of the stoppers down the hill. I shouted at them to stop and then made them roll it back up the bit of the hill it had gone down, while explaining to them that that was quite dangerous, especially as there is a tented village at the bottom of the hill!

We eventually had to tell the girls to get out of the tunnels - they didn't want to leave! The leaders quickly went round putting the stoppers back on and then we headed back down to meet the parents.

This meeting, although not quite as planned, still went very well. If we do it again though, we will suggest to the girls to bring their own torch as that then stops them spending time waiting around for a head torch. We have also asked if there any other dates than we could reattempt the grass sledging as the girls were annoyed that we couldn't do it.

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I am now going on holiday and graduating so there will be no new posts until July 23rd 2018.

Games Night and My Last Meeting | University

24/05/18

This meeting was my last one at my university unit. We were going to take the girls for a walk in the nearby woods as the weather has been so great recently but, unfortunately, the good weather didn't last and rain was forecast for the whole day so we changed our plans and decided to have a games night at the hall instead.

We started the evening with a quick game of Horses and Jockeys as everyone arrived and then played a few rounds of Shoe Bomb once everyone was there.

We then played a game which one of the leaders had found on a Guiding Facebook Group. We separated the girls into 3 teams randomly and gave each team two large-ish pieces of cardboard and one smaller one. The teams lined up at one end of the hall (we put out a line of chairs to mark the start). We then picked one girl from each team to be blindfolded and two girls who were not allowed to speak. We deliberately picked a quiet girl to be blindfolded and the noisy ones to be silent - there was absolute uproar from the noisy ones! The girls then had to get their whole team from one side of the hall to the other without falling in the 'lava' (stepping off their cardboard). If the girl with the blindfold peeped or a silent girl spoke, the whole team had to go back to the start.

To start with, we said that their whole team had to be touching the end wall for them to win, without stepping in the lava but it soon became very clear that the pieces of cardboard were not big enough for all the girls to get on in one go and so we created a 'safe zone' with some more chairs at the other end. Once a girl was in the safe zone, she remained there even if other members of her team had been sent back to the start, and we allowed them to talk and remove the blindfolds there too. It was quite entertaining watching the girls attempting to get to the other end, especially those who were blindfolded. Each team had a different tactic - one team had one of the older girls stand on a piece of cardboard, put the other piece in front of her, lift up the blindfolded girl and put her on the new piece, stand on the new piece herself and then move the previous piece on front of them and continue! I was very impressed as the other two teams were doing variations on "take a small step with your left foot. Put it down. Now the right foot. NO that's too far!" and ended up getting sent back multiple times. Quite a few girls also stood with one foot on each piece of cardboard and skated across to the other side before trying to throw the cardboard back to the start. Sometimes they were successful and other times they then had to run across the lava to rescue the cardboard and then they were sent back to the start too!

Eventually, every girl made it to the safe zone. They then said they wanted to play again but switch up who was blindfolded and silent. We were more than happy for them to do that, so we ended up playing 2 more rounds of this game before we called it quits and got the parachute out instead. We played a couple of quick games of In 'n' Out where alternate girls are trying to keep the ball on the parachute or get it off the parachute. That didn't go as well as planned because the girls all just shook it violently and the ball fired off the parachute and across the room multiple times!

We then decided to play Sharks. The girls absolutely loved this game, and there was a lot of screaming from the girls and laughter from the adults as girls were being pulled under the parachute but friends near them were hanging onto them for dear life. I'm not sure what anyone passing the hall thought we were doing - it sounded like we were murdering the lot of them! There were quite a few shocked faces from the parents as they walked in to pick up their daughters.

We then put the parachute away and got into a circle. The other leaders told the Brownies that tonight was my last night and they gave me a small gift - a National Book Token voucher (very apt for me!). They also apologised that they had not got a card tonight because one of the girls who was tasked with getting all the girls' signatures at school had left it at her friends house! The girls all seemed to be sad to see me go - one even asked "are you leaving forever?". I will be very sad to leave them, some of them I have known for several years as they were Rainbows when I helped out in my second year and had moved up to Brownies by the time I returned after my placement year. I had said that I will keep in touch though. And then, as a final touch, once we had sung Brownie Bells and the girls were leaving, the card appeared - the Mum of the girl who had forgotten it had heard as she arrived that it was at the friends house and had run up the road and back to go and get it for me!

This isn't the end of my Guiding story though, I am heading home from university and returning to my home unit in a few weeks, so stay tuned for that!

Air Ambulance Visit | University

10/05/18

This week we had a visit from the Great Western Air Ambulance Charity  (GWAAC). A volunteer speaker, Richard, came to the hall and set up his projector and banner while we played a quick version of The Chair Game to keep the girls occupied. Once they had finished, we sat them on chairs in a row in front of the screen and introduced Richard.

Richard then gave a half an hour talk about what GWAAC do and what area they cover. He explained that they cover 6 counties across the South West of England, with a population of about 2.1 million but that they recieve no government funding (including the National Lottery) even though they need about £3million a year to operate. He talked about the equipment on the helicopter and that they can perform minor surgical procedures on board. He also talked about the amount of space the helicopter needs to land in (20m square, about the size of our meeting hall!) and the fact that they fly to various hospitals in the area, including Bristol's BRI where the helipad is on top of a tall building. He showed a couple of videos of the helicopter landing in different places.

Once he had finished his talk, he handed out a quiz and wordsearch for the girls to do. We let them work on them for a bit with a break for a drink and biscuit in the middle. We had to do a bit of explaining for some of the questions as they were not really worded in a child-friendly way but once we had explained the girls could usually remember the answers from the talk. I did have one girl say that there were only 6 people living in the area that they cover though!

We then told them the answers to the quiz and had time for a few questions. We had some sensible ones like "have you ever been in the helicopter?" ("no, only really sick people get to go in the helicopter"), and "how long have you worked for GWAAC?" ("2 years as a volunteer speaker") but then we got a few more obscure questions like "have you ever had to do an amputation on the helicopter?" ("yes, very rarely") and "can you do organ transplants on the helicopter?" ("no, but we can do blood transfusions").

During the course of the quiz and question/answer session, we had one girl lose 2 of her teeth so we wrapped them up in paper ready to give to her mum at the end! While I've dealt with many lost teeth, I'm not sure I've ever had a girl lose two teeth in one meeting before!

Once the girls had exhausted their questions, Richard handed out a colouring sheet and a GWAAC pencil to each girl (we had to pay for the pencils but did it from unit funds). We then played a game of Splat to fill the remaining time before handing out some adventure books to the girls who made their promise last meeting, and some Science Investigator badges to the girls who had earnt it from last term.

This week was a nice and simple one from a leaders perspective, we got to sit and listen to the talk and only had to organise a few games to fill a bit of time. The girls also seemed to be fairly interested in the talk and actually remembered a lot of it for the quiz. I think it helped that it was something they are unlikely to learn about anywhere else so they found it interesting.

Crazy Golf

03/05/18

I was at home this week so I visited my home unit for their meeting. This week was local elections in the UK so we couldn't use our usual hall as it is a polling station. Instead, we headed out to a local indoor crazy golf course.

All the girls arrived and we collected in their forms and ticked them off on a register while Brown Owl checked us in and found out how it all worked. You had to go round in a group of 6 or less so we got the girls to get into groups of 5 or 6. Some of the Young Leaders and the Guide Helper wanted to play so we put them with the groups of 5 and then had a Leader who didn't want to play with each group to keep score. There were two different routes that the girls could take and each group headed off into one or the other. Brown Owl was the only leader who wasn't with a specific group and wandered between them all checking up on everyone and doing toilet runs.

In my group, I had a few girls who I didn't know so I did a quick name check and wrote them all on the score card and then headed in. The girls had some interesting techniques for playing golf, including one girl who was a hockey player and kept pushing the ball along with the club instead of hitting it. There was also a lot of stopping balls with feet and nudging them into position which I mostly ignored as they were quite a young group, although I did occasionally stop them when it got a bit too much and reminded them that in golf you have to hit it and let it roll! There were also a couple of holes where you had to hit the ball hard and straight to get it up a slope and so I let them have a few goes and if they couldn't do it then they could put it at the top and carry on.

For the first few holes, we were following a group around who weren't associated with us. We would usually finish our hole just before they finished theirs and the girls would all watch them play their last few shots. They were quite good humoured about the girls 'encouragement', although you could tell that they really had wanted a nice evening out with some drinks and not a hoard of small girls following them round! At one point, we caught up with them at a hole where you hit it up a slope and through one of 4 holes which was then a tunnel to another section. I assumed that this tunnel was to some sort of basket for the next hole and so once they had moved on, we started playing on that hole. What I didn't realise was that the tunnel came out in the second half of the hole, which they were still playing and our balls kept flying out at them! Once we realised, we stopped and let them finish before carrying on with our game. A hole or two later they then decided to go back to the bar for a break and let us get ahead of them. We then didn't see them until we were playing the last hole and they were on the one next to us. When our girls had finished, they were going over and giving them 'tips' on how to do the hole! I eventually managed to pull the girls away and leave the poor people in peace.

Once we had finished, the girls had bought some money and they could get an ice cream or a drink while we waited for everyone else to finish and parents to arrive. One girl didn't have any money and wasn't going to have anything but then another girl offered to buy her an ice cream which we thought was very kind of her.

Overall, I think our girls really enjoyed themselves, even if they weren't very good at the actual golf part - in my group, the par for the route we did was 40 and we had scores ranging from 67 to 111! If you have one of these in the area, I would definitely recommend going, although I have to say that ours is more like mini golf than crazy golf, as there are none of the stereotypical going through tunnels and under bridges that I associate with crazy golf.

More Mathemagician Badge | University

26/04/18

This week we continued with the Mathemagician badge which we started two weeks ago. This week we played Airplanes from Clause 3.

We started the meeting with a game of Wink Murder while the leaders sorted out what we were going to do. It ended up being quite a noisy game, our girls like 'dying' in style!

Once they had finished that, we got some tables out and the girls sat round them, in their sixes. We told them that they would be making paper airplanes and that the best decorated one would win a prize. We gave them a piece of paper and a pencil, as well as $85 of the Brownie Bucks from the activity pack and told them they could start planning what they wanted it to look like while we made up a price list. We looked through the cupboard and pulled out various odds and ends which we wanted to use up and wrote out a price list which we gave to each six.

We then invited the girls up, one six at a time, to do their first big shop. A couple of girls got confused and thought that the piece of paper was for them to make into the plane, not to write on, so they had to go back and do some quick recalculations on what they could afford. Other girls were very meticulous and came up with a list of which colour pencils they wanted! The Leaders ran the shop and made sure the girls were doing any Maths required, such as "if you want 2 stickers, how much is that?" and "you've given me $10 and it cost $6, how much change do you need?". Some of the younger girls were especially proud of the fact that they had done it correctly! We also had one of our older girls who was just buying pipe cleaners for the hell of it, so we decided that prices were going up as stock was low. She came over asking for 3 more and we told her they were now $6 each. She ran off, came back with $20, and when asked how much change she needed said "none". We asked her if she was sure and she thought about it and then said yes. We then saw her talking to the Guide helper and then came back asking for her $2 back! We pointed out that you can't leave a shop and then come back and ask for your change so she want off with a face like thunder!

Time ran away with us a little bit tonight and we suddenly realised that we hadn't done a dry run of the promises we were doing tonight so we stopped the girls and got them in a circle to practice. This unit does quite a complex ceremony, involving the new girl and her sixer skipping round the circle, singing and the unit replying. They then also spin round in front of the mirror as the unit says "twist me and turn me and show me the elf, I looked in the water and there saw" and the new girl replies "myself". As the new girls have never seen this happen, we always have to do a quick practice beforehand.

Once we had done that, I organised the judging of the airplanes. I got each six to show me their plane and tell me a bit about it and then I lined them up and got them to throw them down the hall. We then had a winner for distance and a winner for best decorated. The girls were a bit put out that there weren't actually prizes though!

We had a few minutes spare so we played a quick game of Splat. I had to pull out my cross face at one point because one of our older girls refused to sit down when she was out because she hadn't been paying attention.

Finally, it was time for the promise ceremony. We enrolled 4 new girls, which surprisingly went quicker than expected. We handed out the Mathemagician badges to all the girls and then let them all go home.

This meeting was very good from a leaders point of view, we spent most of the meeting standing and chatting whilst handing out various crafty supplies. The girls also seemed to enjoy the chance to be able to roll play going shopping and choosing what to buy and being able to handle the money. I'm not sure many of the parents let them do that. In hindsight though, our prices were a bit low. We assumed that the girls would want to make more than one plane in their six, so we had set the prices low enough that they would be able to afford a few pieces of paper but they ended up making one per six and so none of them ran out of money at any point.

Look Wider - Out of Doors

I completed the Out of Doors Octant of the Look Wider in September 2017. Below are the activities I completed to gain this badge:

Phase 1

• Try a new wide game
• I organised the wide game on pack holiday in 2014
• Full details are here
• Punting
• As part of the SSAGO Summer Camp at university, we went punting down a river in Oxford
• Gorge Walking
• I have visited and walked through the Liechstensteinklamm Gorge in Austria on two occasions with my family

Phase 2

• Take part in a SSAGO Rally
• I was really struggling with ideas for this one until I spotted this suggestion somewhere, having just got back from my first SSAGO Rally
• I went to Feb-u-rally in Bristol in February 2016. It was absolutely freezing but thoroughly enjoyable - I highly recommend looking into SSAGO if you are heading to a UK university, even if you have never done Guiding or Scouting before

Phase 3

• Going Away With License
• I did my Going Away With License in September 2016 but it took me almost a full year to get all the evidence together and signed off!
• One step closer to starting the Queen's Guide though...

Mathemagician Badge | University

12/04/18

We decided we would do the Mathemagician Challenge Badge with our girls this term. It will take up two meetings, and this was our first. In this meeting, we decided we would do The 1001 Trick, and Magic Square from Clause 1, Map Colouring from Clause 2, and Groups from Clause 4.

We started with the 1001 trick. Each girl had been asked to bring a calculator with her and we had a few spares. We then sat them down around tables with leaders hovering nearby to help out. One leader called out the instructions and the girls followed them. They all seemed impressed by the trick, although it took two attempts for some girls to get the right answer. We didn't attempt to explain why it works, although we did show the girls that multiplying their 3 digit number by 1001 gave the same number repeated. We have quite a few yonger girls in the unit and I was the only leader who understood it so we decided that it would probably take half the evening to explain it to the girls.

We then did the magic square. Each girl was given one 5x5 grid and one 4x4 grid on a piece of paper. We then got them to work out their 8 numbers on the back before filling in the grid. This one took a lot more adult support, especially when it came to finding the 8 numbers initially. Once they had done this, they managed to fill out their 5x5 grids fairly quickly, although some of the younger ones struggled with some of the additions, despite having a calculator in front of them! They then filled out the 4x4 grid and swapped with someone nearby. One of the leaders then called out the instructions for circling and crossing out numbers in this grid. There was some confusion early on as to what numbers they should cross out. The leaders reading the instructions thought it said cross out any number in the row and the column that is equal to the circled one when in fact you had to cross out all the numbers in the same row and column. Once we had sorted that misunderstanding, the girls quite quickly found the four circled numbers and added them up. Almost all girls got the magic number, although I had to help one girl who didn't and we discovered that the initial square was wrong and that the Guide Helper had managed to say that 2+4=8. Once we sorted that, everything worked fine!

I then ran the map colouring. We had only printed the simpler shapes and we handed out a sheet to each girl and told them the instructions. I had a few girls clarify them to start with and then they all just got on with it quite happily. Most girls understood the task and completed it correctly. I think we should have also had the maps of Africa and South America so we could have said to the girls that it was possible to do in four colours or less and then challenged them to do it on the complex map.

Finally, we played a quick game of groups. It got quite hard to work out how many girls were playing as some of them wanted to finish their maps but occasionally played a round or two and then went back to colouring!

All in all, I think this evening went fairly smoothly. It was quite tiring being the most comfortable Mathematician in the room and having to answer all the girls questions, but also a great way to hopefully show girls that Maths can be fun. I'm looking forwards to doing the Clause 3 shopping game at our next meeting. So far, I would thoroughly recommend doing this badge, although having a leader or two who understand the Maths behind the tricks is a good idea.