First Meeting Back - Life Skills

10/01/19

Tonight was our first meeting back after Christmas. We had 5 new girls down to start tonight, 4 of which came (the last was ill). It was quite a challenge to remember all of their names, especially when 2 of them were already in uniform - one is a transfer and another has taken the place of her sister so is wearing her old uniform! They all got stuck in quite quickly though, and joined in the slightly crazy game of tag going on before we started.

Our first order of business was the introduction of our new sponsored animal - the polar bear. Before the summer (while I was away), the girls had raised money for Winston's Wish and WWF and we had then voted to sponsor a polar bear. We had sent the money off and, over Christmas, the polar bear toy came. However, all the other animals we have sponsored have come with a name, but the polar bear's certificate just said 'Thank you for sponsoring the Svalbard Polar Bears' so we asked the girls for suggestions for his name and we will vote (again!) in 2 weeks. We had lots of suggestions, including 'Fluffy', 'Snowball', and 'Misty' and now we need to work out the fairest way of voting for the winning name.

We then started by playing a nice running around game, to try and burn off some of the girls energy! We bought out a game we haven't played for a long while, so long so that it doesn't feature in my blog! Split the unit roughly into 3 and have the three groups line up against the wall, one behind the other. The leaders throw 4 or 5 bouncy balls from behind the girls at the wall opposite and the front row of girls run after them and try and catch them. All those girls then line up behind the rest of the unit and the girls who caught a ball can then throw it for the next group. Keep cycling through until you are bored! Our girls find it really fun, although we did learn the hard way that clear bouncy balls are not a great idea, especially when you have a girl with limited peripheral vision... Lesson learnt for next time though! When we stopped and asked for the balls in though, there was one missing so all the girls went running around looking under all the chairs but it was no where to be seen.

Now the girls had burnt off all their energy, we split into two groups to do some Skills for my Future Unit Meeting Activities. Half the girls did the 'In a Fix' one, and the other half did 'Coin Hunt' and then they swapped over. The girls doing 'In a Fix' were provided with some screws and nails, and some polystyrene boxes saved from Christmas presents. The two leaders with them supervised each girl hammering a nail and screwing a screw into the boxes. The girls were then allowed to practice more with the rest of the screws and nails. I ran the 'Coin Hunt' one - I split the girls into two teams, trying to get them split pretty evenly by age. I gave each group one of each coin (plastic ones bought on Amazon, including the new pound coin) and got them to line them up in order from smallest value to largest. All the girls did very well at that, and I then got them to tell me what values each coin was. A few of them tripped up after 1p and 2p and said 3p! We got a few giggles out of that. I then tipped the coins in a heap at one end of the hall (we decided hiding them around the hall was way too convoluted and we would just end up losing coins). I shouted out an amount to the girls and they had to run to the pile, one at a time, and get a coin until they had made the amount needed. I started off with some simple amounts, like 11p or £1.50 and then slowly increased the difficulty unti we were doing ones such as £1.89, and £3.52. We had a couple of confusions between 1p and 2p coins, but other than that I was very impressed by the girls ability to do mental maths, especially some of the younger girls.

Once the girls had had a chance to do both of the activities, we tidied up the bits of polystyrene from all over the floor and then it was time to hand out the various toys and some new sixer and seconder badges. In the process of tidying up, the lost bouncy ball made a reappearance too, apparently it "just rolled across the floor"... This was one of the better 'new programme' meetings we have done and the girls seemed to really enjoy all of it.