Skills Builders Part 4

14/02/19

This week we continued with the 2 Skills Builders we have been working towards - we are now on activity 4 of 5. The girls doing Lead were teaching each other dance moves, and the girls doing Innovate were building towers from fruit and veg. I was assisting the girls doing Lead. They had to split into 4 teams (ours had 3/4 girls in each). They had to choose a song in their team and then each come up with 2 dance moves to it. They had to teach their dance moves to the rest of their team and then combine them all into a routine which they then performed. We had a wide range of songs, from A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman, to Katy Perry's Firework - all of which were sung by the girls as they performed because we had no way to play a recording. The girls worked pretty well in their teams, although we had one that split into two because they couldn't decide on a song. They didn't fully grasp the concept of all choosing moves so one of the groups had the older girl teach the two younger ones a routine to a song she knew instead. As leaders, we had to observe the groups and award each team one of 4 awards:

• Leadership Star: for the team that gives the best directions to each other
• Teamwork Champions: for the team that works the best together
• Top Encouragers: for the team that's most encouraging towards each other
• Best Listeners: for the team that listened best to each other

This part worked out perfectly as each group slotted into one category very nicely! Once the girls had each performed their routine, we announced the awards, with a special mention to the girl who had been singing her song nice and loudly and carried on when the girls doing the Innovate task stopped talking and turned round to watch too!

The girls doing Innovate were first given slices of various fruits and veg and asked to try and build the tallest tower they could with them. When they started struggling a bit, they were then given large slices of apples and cocktail sticks - the foundations and support beams - and then they could try again. The aim was to try and show them why buildings don't fall over, although we found that the girls didn't really care about the specifics, they just wanted to build towers and then eat the food! We had some quite impressive structures by the end though:

Once we had finished, we then played 2 games of Pirates before doing the Brownie circle and sending the girls home. This meeting was fairly laid back as we did not have to plan too much. The girls also seemed to enjoy the activity they were doing, and we had very few girls ask if they could swap to the other one.

Next week is half term so I am taking week off from blogging (so I can focus on finalising things for our Thinking Day trip in a few weeks!).