22/11/18
Tonight we finished off the last few clauses for the Brownie Traditions badge. We started by telling the girls how Brownies came to be (a cut down version of this story) and then they had 10 minutes in their six to come up with a short play to explain to someone who didn't know about Brownies where they had come from. There was a lot of confusion to start with and we spent a while as Leaders restating parts of the story to various girlswho had forgotten parts. We were very impressed when they performed them though - a lot of the girls had most of the information in there and none of them were reading from notes.
Once they had finished performing them, we got out some tables and chairs. We read out a list of the girls who missed the previous meeting when we had done things towards the Traditions badge and they sat on one table. All the other girls spread themselves out around the rest of the tables. The girls who had missed the previous meeting had a chance to light a candle, shine a penny, and tie 2 knots. The other girls were designing a poster showing what they thought Brownies would be like in 10 years. There was some entertaining suggestions, including levitating toadstools, pack holidays on the moon, and a new uniform that was pink and purple!
While the girls were doing their posters, I took the two girls doing their Hostess badge into the kitchen to set up their decorations and turn on the kettle ready for the parents. The parents arrived shortly after and the girls asked them if they would like tea or coffee. Surprisingly this time, only one of the parents wanted a cup of tea so I helped the girls make it. We then tidied up the tables and did our promise ceremony - we were enrolling 3 girls this week. Two of them even managed to say the whole Promise without reading the wording from the certificate, which we haven;t seen in a long time.
Then all the girls who had finished their posters were given their Traditions badge, and those who hadn't finished were told that if they did it at home then they could have the badge next week.
This was a fairly relaxed meeting, the girls just got on with doing various things and didn't need too much leader input (except for the candle lighting, obviously!) so we could just wander round and chat to them.
Monday 26 November 2018
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 12 November 2018
Remembrance Day Poppies
08/11/18
Tonight we did some activities for Remembrance Day. We made Poppy Bead Badges on safety pins, which we had seen another leader recommend on Facebook. Each girl was given 10 safety pins and we put patterns on the tables. We also put out pots of red and green beads for the girls to use. The girls then had to follow the pattern to put the beads on 9 of the safety pins, and then thread the beaded pins onto the 10th pin.
The finished badge here is slightly different to the design that our girls made - I forgot to take a photo of one that the girls had made!
We had 4 tables of girls, with about 6 girls on each table and each table had a Leader or Young Leader with them. The Leaders spent a lot of time opening and closing safety pins for the girls! Some of the younger ones had never used safety pins before and so couldn't open them to start with (so we taught them) but the pins are quite hard to close once they had beads on them so the Leaders ended up doing a lot of closing of pins. We had the occasional giggle when a girl failed at closing her pin and pinged all the beads off and all over the table. When it came to putting the pins on the final pin, we got the girls to slide them onto the opening side as it was far too hard to get them round to the other side of the pin. I was helping one girl put all her pins on in the right order and, as she put the last pin on, she turned to ask me to help her close it and managed to tip all of them off the pin onto the table! Another girl managed somehow to not only ping all the pins off, but one burst open and pinged beads everywhere too!
Once the girls had successfully made their pin badges, we had also printed copies of "In Flanders Fields" which the girls could copy onto card. Once they had finished, we had some red ink pads and they decorated their poem with thumb print poppies - put two red thumb prints side by side, add a black dot with a sharpie, and a green stem with a felt tip. The finished poems actually looked stunning - it's so simple but so effective.
This evening was a surprising success - we had been warned that the poppy pin badges could be very tricky for Brownies to make but our girls all got stuck in and were really focussed. One girl, who is usually a bit of live-wire and can't sit still, got so into it that she decided she was going to buy beads and pins so she could make other patterns. My table also surprised me by reciting "In Flanders Fields" off by heart - the older girls are doing it as part of their assembly so have all had to learn it. It was also a nice to take a break from the new programme, and going back to an evening for the sake of it, rather than aiming towards a badge.
Tonight we did some activities for Remembrance Day. We made Poppy Bead Badges on safety pins, which we had seen another leader recommend on Facebook. Each girl was given 10 safety pins and we put patterns on the tables. We also put out pots of red and green beads for the girls to use. The girls then had to follow the pattern to put the beads on 9 of the safety pins, and then thread the beaded pins onto the 10th pin.
We had 4 tables of girls, with about 6 girls on each table and each table had a Leader or Young Leader with them. The Leaders spent a lot of time opening and closing safety pins for the girls! Some of the younger ones had never used safety pins before and so couldn't open them to start with (so we taught them) but the pins are quite hard to close once they had beads on them so the Leaders ended up doing a lot of closing of pins. We had the occasional giggle when a girl failed at closing her pin and pinged all the beads off and all over the table. When it came to putting the pins on the final pin, we got the girls to slide them onto the opening side as it was far too hard to get them round to the other side of the pin. I was helping one girl put all her pins on in the right order and, as she put the last pin on, she turned to ask me to help her close it and managed to tip all of them off the pin onto the table! Another girl managed somehow to not only ping all the pins off, but one burst open and pinged beads everywhere too!
Once the girls had successfully made their pin badges, we had also printed copies of "In Flanders Fields" which the girls could copy onto card. Once they had finished, we had some red ink pads and they decorated their poem with thumb print poppies - put two red thumb prints side by side, add a black dot with a sharpie, and a green stem with a felt tip. The finished poems actually looked stunning - it's so simple but so effective.
This evening was a surprising success - we had been warned that the poppy pin badges could be very tricky for Brownies to make but our girls all got stuck in and were really focussed. One girl, who is usually a bit of live-wire and can't sit still, got so into it that she decided she was going to buy beads and pins so she could make other patterns. My table also surprised me by reciting "In Flanders Fields" off by heart - the older girls are doing it as part of their assembly so have all had to learn it. It was also a nice to take a break from the new programme, and going back to an evening for the sake of it, rather than aiming towards a badge.
Monday 5 November 2018
New UMA Testing - On Pointe
01/11/18
Brown Owl was on holiday for this meeting, so it fell to me to plan and run the whole meeting. Luckily, I was saved from half of that task by an email saying we had been selected to test a new Unit Meeting Activity card. The card we had been given was called 'On Pointe' from the Express Myself theme and was all about exploring ballet moves. There was no prep for me to do as a leader for the activity itself, however I did need to plan how the girls were going to give their feedback - giving them a double sided piece of A4 paper with lots of questions on didn't feel like the best plan! Instead, I printed the 3 questions which required an answer on a scale out with smiley faces for them to colour in.
I then bought some post it notes from Amazon and made up 3 sheets for them to stick them to - "Something I enjoyed" (green post it), "Something I didn't enjoy" (pink post it), and "Something that would make it better" (orange post it). That covered most of the questions that were sent in the feedback questionnaire and then my plan was to shuffle the girls answers into the other questions if they answered those inadvertently! (I was missing "What would make the instructions easier to follow" and "Do you have any other comments").
On the day of the meeting, I set off to the hall nice and early and got myself ready. The girls all arrived and lots of them asked where Brown Owl was. I told them she was on holiday and one girl's response was just "How rude!". We started the meeting as normal, with the Brownie circle and show and tell for one six. I then explained to the girls that the people who run all of Girlguiding had asked us to test an activity which might become part of the new programme. I explained that we would be following the instructions on my card and then they would get a chance to write down what bits they liked and what bits they didn't.
The instructions first asked us to play our favourite warm up game so I asked the girls if they had any suggestions of something to play that involved running around. One girl asked if we could play her friends game which was a version of Tag. You start with 3 people who are "it" and they have to hold hands. The end ones can tag other girls and once the line has 4 people in it, it can split in half. Those lines then tag people and can split when they get to 4 people. It was quite a good game, until we heard a thump and a girl came running over clutching her head and crying. The other leaders took her aside and sat her down. They put a cold compress on her head while I continued supervising the rest of the game. The next thing I knew, I was told that they had called her Mum to pick her up as her head was swelling up spectacularly... Mum came and the girl then decided she was fine and didn't want to go home because she didn't want to miss the rest of the activity. The other leaders said that we would email out the instructions and she could do them at home and then show us next week, so she could also get the credit for it. That made her much happier and she went off with Mum.
After we had finished the game, I then asked the girls to spread out and find a space. I then had to teach them some ballet moves. The card gave instructions on how to do positions 1-4 for the arms and feet, as well as 4 moves - plié, tendu, elevé, and sauté. I worked through the 4 positions, recapping the previous ones as we went and then did the 4 moves. The card then said to spend some time practicing, by having the leader call out the moves randomly and getting the girls to see if they could remember.
They then had to get into small groups - I decided 4/5 was plenty - and they had 10 minutes to come up with a short dance about their day, using only those 8 moves we had just learnt. I then spent the time looping aroud the groups helping them come up with ideas and resolving minor disputes. A lot of the girls moaned that it was too difficult to come up with anything just using those 8 moves, especially given none of them involved any moving so their dance was just going to be on one spot. I told them that they had to do their best and try and I also pointed out that we are testing the activity so it might not be perfect and they would get a chance to tell Guiding that at the end of the meeting. That placated most of the girls and they came up with something.
Once the 10 minutes was up, I stopped the girls and we watched each dance and guessed what each group had done that day. Some of the dances were actually pretty good for only having 8 stationary moves to choose from - and of course some groups had loosely interpreted the brief and added extra hand movements or moved!
I then had the girls sit in a circle and handed out the questionnaire sheets and pens. Once they had coloured in one face for each question, they could go and write on any of the post it notes which I spread around the hall. I was quite surprised at how many post it notes I ended up getting - we didn't specify they had to do one of each but I think most of them did anyway! I was also very surprised to see that the original reservations I, and other leaders, had about the activity featured heavily in the girls negative feedback - most notably questioning why it was only ballet and not "modern or street". I was left with 3 very colourful pieces of paper to transport home and type up for the feedback form! I was also tickled by some of the spellings of ballet!
We still had a bit of time to spare, so we played another round of the Tag variant we started the meeting with, a game of Trains, and a game of Pirates. It was then time to say goodbye and send the girls home. The meeting seemed to go OK, although I was pretty accurate in my initial assessment of the activity - I didn't think it would go down particularly well with our girls and I was right. They participated but they weren't particularly happy about it!
Once I got home, I decided that our accident was serious enough to warrant filling out the Girlguiding Accident Form and so I sent that off to HQ and to my District Commissioner. I also emailed the Mum the next day to see how her daughter was doing, as well as to send her the activity and a copy of the forms but I am still waiting to hear back from her. As I said to my DC, it had to happen on the one night Brown Owl was away, didn't it!
Brown Owl was on holiday for this meeting, so it fell to me to plan and run the whole meeting. Luckily, I was saved from half of that task by an email saying we had been selected to test a new Unit Meeting Activity card. The card we had been given was called 'On Pointe' from the Express Myself theme and was all about exploring ballet moves. There was no prep for me to do as a leader for the activity itself, however I did need to plan how the girls were going to give their feedback - giving them a double sided piece of A4 paper with lots of questions on didn't feel like the best plan! Instead, I printed the 3 questions which required an answer on a scale out with smiley faces for them to colour in.
I then bought some post it notes from Amazon and made up 3 sheets for them to stick them to - "Something I enjoyed" (green post it), "Something I didn't enjoy" (pink post it), and "Something that would make it better" (orange post it). That covered most of the questions that were sent in the feedback questionnaire and then my plan was to shuffle the girls answers into the other questions if they answered those inadvertently! (I was missing "What would make the instructions easier to follow" and "Do you have any other comments").
On the day of the meeting, I set off to the hall nice and early and got myself ready. The girls all arrived and lots of them asked where Brown Owl was. I told them she was on holiday and one girl's response was just "How rude!". We started the meeting as normal, with the Brownie circle and show and tell for one six. I then explained to the girls that the people who run all of Girlguiding had asked us to test an activity which might become part of the new programme. I explained that we would be following the instructions on my card and then they would get a chance to write down what bits they liked and what bits they didn't.
The instructions first asked us to play our favourite warm up game so I asked the girls if they had any suggestions of something to play that involved running around. One girl asked if we could play her friends game which was a version of Tag. You start with 3 people who are "it" and they have to hold hands. The end ones can tag other girls and once the line has 4 people in it, it can split in half. Those lines then tag people and can split when they get to 4 people. It was quite a good game, until we heard a thump and a girl came running over clutching her head and crying. The other leaders took her aside and sat her down. They put a cold compress on her head while I continued supervising the rest of the game. The next thing I knew, I was told that they had called her Mum to pick her up as her head was swelling up spectacularly... Mum came and the girl then decided she was fine and didn't want to go home because she didn't want to miss the rest of the activity. The other leaders said that we would email out the instructions and she could do them at home and then show us next week, so she could also get the credit for it. That made her much happier and she went off with Mum.
After we had finished the game, I then asked the girls to spread out and find a space. I then had to teach them some ballet moves. The card gave instructions on how to do positions 1-4 for the arms and feet, as well as 4 moves - plié, tendu, elevé, and sauté. I worked through the 4 positions, recapping the previous ones as we went and then did the 4 moves. The card then said to spend some time practicing, by having the leader call out the moves randomly and getting the girls to see if they could remember.
They then had to get into small groups - I decided 4/5 was plenty - and they had 10 minutes to come up with a short dance about their day, using only those 8 moves we had just learnt. I then spent the time looping aroud the groups helping them come up with ideas and resolving minor disputes. A lot of the girls moaned that it was too difficult to come up with anything just using those 8 moves, especially given none of them involved any moving so their dance was just going to be on one spot. I told them that they had to do their best and try and I also pointed out that we are testing the activity so it might not be perfect and they would get a chance to tell Guiding that at the end of the meeting. That placated most of the girls and they came up with something.
Once the 10 minutes was up, I stopped the girls and we watched each dance and guessed what each group had done that day. Some of the dances were actually pretty good for only having 8 stationary moves to choose from - and of course some groups had loosely interpreted the brief and added extra hand movements or moved!
I then had the girls sit in a circle and handed out the questionnaire sheets and pens. Once they had coloured in one face for each question, they could go and write on any of the post it notes which I spread around the hall. I was quite surprised at how many post it notes I ended up getting - we didn't specify they had to do one of each but I think most of them did anyway! I was also very surprised to see that the original reservations I, and other leaders, had about the activity featured heavily in the girls negative feedback - most notably questioning why it was only ballet and not "modern or street". I was left with 3 very colourful pieces of paper to transport home and type up for the feedback form! I was also tickled by some of the spellings of ballet!
We still had a bit of time to spare, so we played another round of the Tag variant we started the meeting with, a game of Trains, and a game of Pirates. It was then time to say goodbye and send the girls home. The meeting seemed to go OK, although I was pretty accurate in my initial assessment of the activity - I didn't think it would go down particularly well with our girls and I was right. They participated but they weren't particularly happy about it!
Once I got home, I decided that our accident was serious enough to warrant filling out the Girlguiding Accident Form and so I sent that off to HQ and to my District Commissioner. I also emailed the Mum the next day to see how her daughter was doing, as well as to send her the activity and a copy of the forms but I am still waiting to hear back from her. As I said to my DC, it had to happen on the one night Brown Owl was away, didn't it!
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