Badges and Brownie Adventure

19/9/13

We started off this evening by making the badges for pack holiday. The girls are split into sixes and choose what character they are going to be (we have Agnes, Lucy and Dave this year) and then the Leaders all choose their own characters for the weekend too. Each girl makes a badge to wear for the weekend so we know what six they are in as do the leaders. Our district owns a badge machine (an absolutely ancient one!) which is loaned out to units who want to make badges. Basically the girls colour in a design (which we had pre-printed from the internet) and then it is placed in the machine, you pull a handle and it creates the badge for you - it fascinates the girls every time! We collect in the badges once they've been made so that they don't get lost between this meeting and next weekend, when pack holiday is. Any girl who is not going on pack holiday can also make a badge, either using a spare design we had printed or colouring in a blank circle however they like, and they are allowed to take it home there and then. I quite enjoy sitting and colouring with the girls because you get to know some of them a bit better as they'll just start to talk about their life and school and stuff. It helps me keep in touch with them too which makes planning evenings a bit easier. 

Once the girls had finished, we tidied away the tables and they did a challenge from their Brownie Adventure or Brownie Adventure On book. If you don't know what these are, they are books that the girls have for their first and second halves of being a Brownie respectively which contain stories and activities for them to complete. You can also get a badge for doing a variety of the activities from the book along with a few other things, including doing interest badges, attending extra events and doing various other meetings. The girls were split into two groups; the younger ones and the older ones. I was helping the group of younger girls, who were learning to sign their names, as I can sign the BSL alphabet. I helped a few of them to work out their name from the pictures in their book and then I challenged them to guess my middle name after I had signed it to them. Most of them were really good at it and it turned out that they had had a partially deaf boy in their class for a while so a lot of them had learnt some basic words and phrases. I was quite surprised at this because I never had the opportunity to learn that sort of thing at primary school - I picked it up with a friend for fun a few years back (although I'm looking into doing a course to learn more). 

We finished off the evening by singing one of the girls' favourite songs-'Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar' (lyrics here).

This was a good evening because I got to sit and talk to the girls which is one of my favourite parts of helping at the unit. I also found out things about the girls that I didn't already know. It was a nice, relaxing evening - reminding me why I do this.

And finally, just a bit of housekeeping: we are going away on pack holiday on Friday so my next post won't be up next Monday (although you can console yourself with the fact that there will be a couple of posts in the week afterwards about pack holiday!)