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!