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.
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