St. David's Day

28/02/19

Given it is St. David's Day tomorrow, we thought we would do some activities to celebrate this week. We started with the limited edition UMA, 'Make Your Snake' which we modified to be a dragon instead. The first comment that our girls had was 'Cecil can't be a dragon, Cecil is a caterpillar...'! We split them into the sixes and gave them a bag with 6 different coloured tokens in (we didn't want to faff around finding them hidden around the room!). The girl pulled a token out of their bag and came up to a leader to get post-it notes in that colour. A leader then read them the question and made sure they understood it before leaving them to write their answer on their post-it note and stick it in the right area of Cecil. I helped a few of the younger ones with their spelling and understanding of the question. My favourite conversation was with one of our newest girls:

Me: The yellow question is "what would you miss if you weren't a Brownie?"
Her: You!
Me: Awww, that's very sweet, thank you
Her: No, actually, Brown Owl
Me: Oh, so you wouldn't miss me then?
Her: OK, both of you! What's your name? *struggles to spell my name*
Me: What about <other leader>?
Her: Who's she?
Me: *points at other leader*
Her: Oh yeah, how do I spell her name?

Once all the sixes had done all 6 questions, we all sat around Cecil and discussed the remaining question - how would you encourage Cecil's sister, Cecilia, to join Brownies. We first asked the girls why Cecilia might think she can't be a Brownie and one of the girls, completely deadpan, just said "because she's a dragon"!! We then discussed why Cecilia might want to join Brownies (if she wasn't a dragon!). My favourite comment we had for this question was "to give your parents a break!". Here is our whole dragon (his head is the pale pink end!)

We then spent the remaining 30 minutes making daffodils. You cut some daffodil petals out of yellow craft foam ad cut a hole in the centre - Brown Owl had drawn them out already so the hole was the right size. You then took a strip of slightly darker yellow foam and cut some wiggles out of one long edge. You take a pipe cleaner and roll the long piece around the end of it, with most of the pipe cleaner sticking out the flat edge of the foam. Push this through the hole in the other piece of foam. Make some leaves from green foam and twist them into the bottom of the pipe cleaner. They end up looking like these ones, from Baker Ross.

The girls all enjoyed the UMA more than we thought they would, and we got lots of interesting comments from them - from the sounds of it, a cake/pudding night would go down very well! They also liked making the daffodils, although a few of them struggled rolling the centre tight enough to fit through the hole. This meeting flew by really quickly!

There may not be a blog next week as I have to go on a work trip and am not sure if I'll be back in time, although we are also going on our Thinking Day trip on Saturday so I might get that typed up in time instead.