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.