Board Games and Chocolate

17/09/15

This week there was a picnic to celebrate the 50 birthday of the local primary school, which most of our girls attend. As such, we only had 10 girls. We had asked the girls the previous week who was going to the picnic so we already knew it was going to be a depleted meeting.

We bought 2 board games for the girls to play in groups of 2 or 3. The first was a version of snakes and ladders, called worms and fleas. You jumped up the fleas and slid down the worms. There was also the added complication of pills (don't slide down the next worm you land on) and flea drops (move forwards to the next flea and jump up it). The other was a Paddington Bear game. Each girl had 2 slices of bread and a jar of marmalade (as tokens) which they placed on any square on the track. Each time they rolled the dice they had the choice of going forwards hat many, or backwards (not both). By the end of the track, they had to have collected 2 slices of bread and a jar of marmalade each (not necessarily the ones they had put on the board), so that Paddington could make himself a marmalade sandwich!

At the same time, we decorated chocolate disks. Our Young Leaders melted some chocolate, and spread it in thin disks on greaseproof paper. They let it set a bit and then the girls came in to decorate them with all the left-over decorations we had from various other cooking evenings. We had white chocolate buttons, smarties, and various shaped sprinkles. All the girls were really good at only taking a few, and not just loading it up with as much sugary stuff as possible (as we've had in the past). Can't quite say the same for us Leaders after the girls had gone though, and we were left with some bars of chocolate and a tube of smarties!

When they were all done we played a game of Chinese Charades. We found that it was a good game with fairly short lines of girls; we added in a few leaders and had 2 lines of 6 girls. The girls seemed to enjoy it too. We also sang a couple of songs: 'There Was an Old Man', and 'Cookie Jar'.

Finally we let the girls go home, which was far less complicated with a small number! Sometimes it is nice to have a meeting with a few girls as you get to spend some time with them more one-on-one, however I wouldn't want to do it every week - there are some things that are designed for more people.