Charity Shop Game/Jigsaw Checking

07/02/19

Near to our meeting place is a charity shop, and Brown Owl knows some of the people who work there. They get lots of donations of items to sell, but can only sell those which are complete. Brown Owl helps them out by frequently collecting jigsaws and checking they have all the pieces. We decided once a few years ago to collect some kid-friendly jigsaws and games and have the Brownies check them instead. Tonight we did that again. We had 3 large bags of jigsaws and games and the girls were told to collect an item from the bag, check all the pieces were there for the games and do the jigsaws to make sure there weren't any missing pieces. If it had all the pieces, then we taped it shut and made a pile, and if there were pieces missing then we made a pile to be binned (as they cannot sell those). The girls all got stuck in with this really quickly and our pile of complete items grew rapidly. There were a couple of jigsaws which were missing a piece, and a game which needed batteries so we couldn't check it at the meeting but other than that it was quite a successful evening. I ended up helping a group of girls who had picked up a box of jigsaws. There were 9 jigsaws, with a variety of number of pieces, all split into bags but with no indication of which one was in which bag. Once you had made the jigsaws, they then joined together into three long thin jigsaws, which had silly little end pieces (which we gave up trying to put on and just counted!). The girls all enjoyed making the jigsaws, but it was quite painful watching some of them trying to put pieces in completely the wrong places (non-edge piece in an edge spot etc.)!

Once we had done all the charity shop items, we had some spare time so we played a game on Tomato (as suggested by a Brownie) - it is like Fish and Chips but instead of a girl saying "Fish and Chips", they say "Tomato" in a funny voice and the girl at the front has to guess who said it. We only had time for a couple of rounds as the girls took ages guessing!

The last thing we did this evening was to hand out the new anniversary badges. We are lucky in that we have a decent sized budget and so we could buy all the previous badges for our girls too. We had loads of them getting 1 year, quite a few getting 2, a handful getting 3 and one girl who had done 5 years (although she ticked over after Brown Owl bought the badges so she didn't get them all tonight)!

This meeting was a nice relaxed one as I just got the opportunity to sit and chat with the girls and do some jigsaws. They all seemed to like being given the responsibility of making sure all the pieces were in everything too, and seemed to grasp the fact that they would be sold to make money for children with disabilities to go on a holiday/trip somewhere. I will definitely be trying to bring this tradition to the unit I join when I move house.