Senior Section Trip to London

03/10/15

As some of you may be aware, this year is the Senior Section Centenary. Across the country, lots of events aimed at the Senior Section are being organised. One of these was our region's recent trip to London for a wide game. We weren't given any details, except that it would involve being in a team of 4 and travelling across London completing a mission. As we have 4 Senior Section members helping at our unit, we decided to sign up for it.

A few days before we were due to go, we were given our mission - take photos with as many modes of transport as possible (along with at least one team member), over the course of 5 hours. There were also bonus points for various landmarks and guiding buildings.

We got to the train station at 8:45, ready to get on the train. We managed to get a table seat and pulled out or maps to get planning our route and making a list of all modes of transport we could think of. When we got to the next station, we bumped into several other Senior Section members heading to the same event, who had the same idea as us - plan the route on the way there.

We arrived at London Paddington and, when the clock hit 11am, we were given the signal - let the competition begin! Almost immediately we spotted a teen on a skateboard so we accosted him and took a photo - he seemed a bit confused... We ran around in the station for a while, getting as many obscure pictures as possible - including scissor lifts, piggy backs, and our own feet!

We then headed out into the streets of London. We took a fair few of the obvious photos - London cabs, buses, vans, and cars. A few of our photos took a little more work to get though - notably, the police van who asked the criminals in the back if they were OK with the photo, despite us not being able to see them; the people in the back of a cab who posed too; and the woman in the elephant onsie who was protesting about elephants not being used in circuses..!

We also went to the transport museum to see if we could get in. The answer was, yes, under 15s could go in for free, so the other 3 went to do some speed photos, while I waited in the shop and took a few photos of my own - a child's pram, a wheelbarrow (bizarrely full of plushie moles), and a ride-on suitcase! The others did the whole museum in 15 minutes flat - a pretty impressive feat!

We paused for lunch in a MacDonalds and then our quest continued. We focused on the landmarks more in the second half of the day - heading first for Trafalgar Square. There was a pretty large festival type thing going on so we stood on a wall to get proof we had been near, if not quite in, to it. We then rounded a corner and found an ambulance and proceeded to try and persuade the driver to let us through the barrier to take a photo with it. He said he couldn't do that but he was happy to pass a wheelchair through the barrier so we took a photo of that too!

We then headed down towards Downing Street to see if we could take a photo outside number 10. Unfortunately the answer was no as we hadn't pre-booked but we took a photo of the gate and a police officer and hoped that would count! We also went to Baden Powell House, Horse Guards Parade, Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace, before finally arriving at the Girlguiding HQ.

We sat down to work out how many point we had got (which took a long time) and came to 468! All the other teams were comparing obscure photos and looking round the shop before the winner was announced - it was us!

We were given a goodie bag which contained lots of sweets, a phone case and a Senior Section Spectacular badge for each of us. Everyone who attended was also given a LaSER London Challenge badge as we had completed it by taking part.

It was a great day out, and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who gets the chance to do something similar! There isn't much time to stop and see much, but you get a pretty good overview of London.

A selection of our photos:

Team evening in a park

09/07/15

[First off, apologies for this being late; what with visiting the boyfriend and starting a new job, I completely forgot I hadn't written last week's meeting up!]

This week was organised by our YL as part of her YLQ. We joined forces with another unit who meet in a different hall on the same night and did several team-building games in a local field.

First then girls stood in a circle. A ball was given to one girl who had to say a girl's name, throw the ball to that girl and sit down. This continued until all the girls were sat down. We didn't think it would work too well as none of our girls knew any of the other unit's girls but we did eventually get all of them sat down by getting them to ask a girl's name and then throw her the ball. They then all stood back up and were tasked with remembering who they threw the ball to last time and doing it again without having to ask the girl what her name was first. It went relatively well considering it was the first time any of them had met each other. If you are doing this in your unit where everyone knows everyone else, then you can give the ball to the last girl standing and task them with throwing it back to the girl who threw it to them.

The girls were then separated into 3 groups with an even mix of each unit for some other games. One of the games was a blindfolded obstacle course. The girls were split again into 2 teams, with an even number from each unit. One girl (usually a sixer) was in charge of navigation and the rest of her team took it in turn to be blindfolded and guided around the obstacle course (round some cones, stepping over some ropes, through a zigzag) while carrying a cupful of water. When all the girls had been down the course, the amount of water left in each team's cup was measured and a winner declared. The next was a game of charades in their two teams. The final game was a 'how well you know people' type quiz. Each girl had to write a given fact about her (something she likes, something she dislikes, an obscure fact etc.) on a piece of paper and put it in a hat. Each team then took it in turns to pull a piece of paper out the hat and guess which girl had out it in. If they got it right, they got a point for their team, otherwise it was passed over to the other team to have a guess.

Finally, the girls, in their 3 groups, played a game with a ball. All the girls stood in a line, with the one at the front holding the ball. It was then passed over her head to the girl behind, then between her legs to the next girl and so on until it reached the back. The last girl then ran to the front of the line and started again. The winner was the first team to cross a ''finish line' with their whole team. We found it quite hard to stop the girls drifting forwards while the ball was being passed down the line but they were having fun so we didn't mind too much!

Overall, this went relatively smoothly for it being the YLs first taste of planning and running a meeting by herself. We had to give her a few pointers when she'd forgotten something (like a rainy-day plan) but all-in-all she did a great job of organising it. And it was all the better for me as I didn't have to do much and could catch up with a friend who helps at the other unit who I haven't seen for almost a year!

Visitor from National Star College

12/06/14

This week we had a visit from a local charity, National Star College. One of the girls suggested it as her mum works there and she came, along with a colleague, to tell the girls about what they do and do a couple of activities. They first sat the girls in a circle and told them all about what the College does. Basically, it is a college for children and adults with disabilities where they can "realise their potential as equal and active citizens in control of their lives". They asked the girls if they knew what a charity was, what it meant to have a disability and then talked about the various kinds of disabilities. I was very surprised at the answer given when they were asked what a disability is: "when someone can't do something because the part of their body that helps them do it doesn't work any more"! When I was 9, as the girl who said this is, I would never have been able to say it so concisely and cover all possibilities in one sentence... 

They then got the girls to get into groups to do some activities revolving around removing the use of a certain part of the body and trying to do basic tasks. They had to:

• Pick up a coin with a sock on their hand
• Put a sock on with one hand in a sling
• Talk to a friend while holding a lollypop stick in their mouth and see how much they could understand
• Tell a friend something by pointing at letters on an alphabet sheet

The girls all seemed to enjoy putting on the sock while wearing a sling, and the vast majority were quite good at it too. Some of them seemed to be getting a bit bored though as we only had 5 slings and 27 girls which meant that some had to wait a long time and all the other activities were quite quick to do so they didn't have anything else to do. 

They then got the girls back into a circle and discussed how they found the activities and how they would feel if they had to live like that all the time. Most of the girls said that it made them feel frustrated and they wouldn't like to live like that. They then said that any money we raise (we've had to postpone our fundraising to September because we ran out of space in the term to do it, sadly) will go towards helping the students feel more independent and less frustrated as they'll be able to buy specialist equipment to help them. 

They finished up by giving the girls some stars to colour in and said they could do it any way they liked as long as they didn't use their normal writing hand! We had some girls colouring with their non-dominant hand, some with their feet, some with their mouths and one girl who held the pen between her elbows! Some of the colouring wasn't too bad either.

The girls seemed to thoroughly enjoy the evening as it was more hands on than previous visitors we've had. Most people seem to forget what age group they're talking to and give the talk they would give to adults which just makes the girls bored and thus restless and disruptive. These two women though kept them interested by asking them questions and giving them an activity to break things up. It also gave me an insight into what the girls know about disabilities - a surprising amount!

Codes and Promises

06/03/14

This week we did some more for the Big Brownie Birthday badge. We decided to do codes. The girls were given a photocopy of a page from the Adventure book which had a code on for them to crack. It was just a basic a=26, b=25 etc. but it took some explaining to the girls about how they could go about cracking it. They had been given some letters to start with so we were getting them to write the alphabet out (some girls had problems with that, which surprised me...) and put in the numbers underneath so they could spot any patterns. Eventually, they did pick up on what we were getting at and, once they knew the code, it was easy for them to then solve it and find all the words. 

We then gave them another piece of paper with two codes explained on. One was Pig Pen and the other was the mobile phone code. They were then told they could write a message to their friend who would then have to decode it. Some girls decided to carry on using the basic substitution code to write messages and a couple tried to use the Pig Pen cypher. One of the Young Leaders also wrote out two messages in Pig Pen for the girls to try and decode. None of them asked me about the mobile phone code and I don't think any of them did it - probably because they didn't understand; I'm not sure how many of them actually have mobiles.

The codes in the Adventure book photocopy were all about Iranian New Year (which incidentally is some time soon) so we decided to play the Iranian smiling game (instructions here) because we had some spare time. Brown Owl chose the two girls who were making their Promise that night to start off and one of the Young Leaders and I went with them to the first person as they're both quite shy. The girl I was with really didn't want to make a fool of herself making girls smile so we didn't even get the first girl to smile but the other girl got a few people to smile. The game went very well - now that we've steered away from playing fishes continually, the girls seem to enjoy playing games more and play fairly - and this is a fairly popular one too because it gives the girls an excuse to be a little bit silly without getting told off!

We then had the Promise ceremony for the two new girls. One of them managed her Promise with a little bit of prompting from Brown Owl (and an interesting amalgamation of the old and new one at one point!) but the shy-er girl (who I was with in the game) got hers out with no prompting and it was nice and loud despite a few tears when her parents arrived because she didn't want to do it. 

We finished off the meeting with a quick song: 'Hole at the Bottom of the Sea' (lyrics here) and then sent the girls home. It was a good meeting and fairly low maintenance as we were just pointing the girls in the right direction. They complained initially when we told them we were doing codes this evening but they all seemed to enjoy it and even requested that we do Morse Code at some point, with torches, so it must have been a success on some parts!

Design a Room

27/02/14

This evening we did some more of the Big Brownie Birthday badge by getting the girls to design their future bedrooms. This can also count towards their Brownie Adventure badges as one of the challenges. We gave them several options for how they could design their room - either by drawing it on a piece of paper as if they were stood by the door, looking in; by drawing a floor plan from above; or by creating a 3D model of it. The 3D model was an idea Brown Owl had which she thought might be more interesting for the girls to do but it turned out to be far harder than we had anticipated... Most of the girls had a pretty good go at using the templates that Brown Owl had photocopied but they hadn't copied very well so some of the girls were getting confused as to which lines were dotty and therefore needed cutting along and which lines they needed to fold along. That meant that us leaders were kept quite busy helping the girls because the vast majority wanted to do the 3D model! Most of them turned out quite well though - even if most of them weren't coloured in because it took too long to make them.

We finished and tidied up with a few minutes to spare so we decided to sing the song I'd planned for my Chinese New Year evening - 'My Ship Sailed From China' (lyrics here). The girls found it quite funny!

It was a good evening tonight - I got to sit and help the girls which is one of the things I love about Brownies. And they all got stuck in and tried even if they couldn't really do it all, which is why we decided it could count towards their Brownie Adventure challenge section too.

First meeting back - team building games

09/01/14

This week we started the Big Brownie Birthday Challenge badge. For those of you who don't know, here is an explanation but it's basically just a variety of challenges the girls can do based around Guiding through the ages and at the end of it they get a badge.

We decided to start with one of the compulsory tasks which was team work, something our girls struggle with sometimes! For the first game, we had the girls in their sixes and gave each six 3 sheets of newspaper. We then told them that there was a river in front of them which they had to cross using their newspaper pieces as stepping stones. The stepping stones could hold any number of girls as long as not so much as a toe touched the floor - at which point the offending girl had to return to the start! They were told that they would get 4 points for each girl who made it to the other side of the room and the first team across would get an extra 10 points. They were also told that, if a girl fell off, her six could chose to either leave her behind and carry on or they could all go back for her and start again. Having explained these rules to the girls, each leader was assigned a six and told to be quite ruthless in picking up on toes off the newspaper and the race was on! It was quite a close race between the sixes with a fair few girls being left behind by her sixes (and one sixer who told her six to go and leave her behind because they were winning). The girls then added up their points and there was some celebration because the six that got there first had the most points, despite having left 2 of their number behind. Brown Owl then told the girls that she'd forgotten to tell them one of the rules! This 'forgotten' rule was that, for every girl they'd left behind, they lost 10 points. This caused some dissent because the original winning team went down to last place because they'd left behind the most people and the team which originally was in last place ended up coming first because they hadn't left anyone behind! This was quite a good game to show girls that, by working together as a team, they could do better than when they were just thinking of themselves. 

We then did another team activity to see if they could put what they'd just learnt into practice. Each sixer was given a whiteboard and pen and the sixes were told they had to think of a job and create a short mime for the other sixes to guess. We left them to it for this and just observed the different approaches. Three of our four sixes took the 'free for all' approach, where all the girls were talking at once and refusing to listen to each other or back down from their idea when no one else wanted to do it. The fourth six (incidentally, the one that won the previous game) had a much better approach where the sixer asked each girl in turn for her idea and then they chose their collective favourite. They had 5 minutes to practice their mime and then we went round the room watching each mime. The other three sixes had to come up with one guess from their six which they wrote on the whiteboard and then they all showed them simultaneously. For each six that guessed the job correctly, the performing six and the guessing six got one point, which they noted as a dot on their whiteboard. This bit went OK with only one disagreement within a six which was quickly resolved. Once all four sixes had finished the girls went back to their six corners. They were then told to add a point (dot) to their whiteboard for every suggestion that had been made and listened to and another point for each girl who took an active part in the mime (i.e. didn't just stand there, not helping). The girls then sat in a circle in their six, facing outwards. The board was passed round each girl and they had to add a dot if they thought their six worked well together and listened to each other and remove a dot if they didn't think they had worked well together. It took a while to coordinate all this point distribution but, once it was complete, it was quite interesting to see which sixes had the most points! The six who won the previous game came first by a long margin, having not lost any points and the other sixes were lagging behind quite significantly. I'm not sure quite how much they took from this meeting but it's nice to see that at least one of our sixers is capable of making her six work as a team.

We finished off the evening by singing 'Cookie Jar' (lyrics here) and then the girls went home. This was quite an interesting evening from the point of view of a Young Leader because I was able to see which girls are the 'problem girls' in each six, i.e. the ones who refuse to back down and just continually shout at their team or cry until they get their own way. It means that in future team activities we can avoid putting all these girls in the same team or can keep an eye on groups with them in try and resolve problems before they get too severe. Overall, a success and one step closer to our Big Brownie Birthday Adventure badge! 

(Apologies for the long post this time - I haven't written in a while so I'm struggling to say things in a condensed manner at the moment!)

Challenge evening

10/10/13

This evening we ran a challenge evening which can go towards their Adventure/Adventure On badge. They were all split into their sixes and rotated through 5 different activities. Each leader was given an activity to run and the girls had 5 minutes to complete them, after which the leader would write down their score to be added up later.

Before we started, the girls were read a 'shopping list' which they were told to remember for the end of the meeting, as a six. Some of the girls all tried to remember all the items whereas some sixes had each girl remembering one or two items from the list, which seemed to make sense to me.

1. Cities
I was on this activity. I was given a map of Britain with 10 dots on it and an envelope of 10 city names. The girls were given the challenge of matching up the names to where they are. They ranged from places they should know (such as London and the local town), others they should have been able to guess (Aberystwyth - the only dot in Wales!) and a few which even I struggled with (Penzance for example). Most of them got the 'easy' ones although we had a few interesting placements of our own town, including in Scotland! One of the sixes resorted to asking me "Is this number 1? Is it number 2? Is it number 3?..." until they got it right..! Others tried to guess but were generally unsuccessful. I don't understand how they can not know anything about our country; even I could make educated guesses for the few I didn't know straight off and, when I was their age, I had a greater knowledge of our country than they appear to...

2. Paperclip chains
The six was given a box of around 100 paperclips and told to make the longest chain they could. Obviously, the best way to go about this would be for each girl to take a few and start making a short chain and then join them together at the end but some sixes didn't seem to get this idea and were all trying to add to the same chain. Unsurprisingly, the sixes that made the longest chain (using all the paperclips) were the ones who made several chains and joined them together!

3. Don't Say That
In this activity one girl was chosen and she had to stand facing all the others. She was then given a card with a word at the top to describe and a list of 4 words underneath that couldn't be used in describing the top word. The rest of her six had to guess what word she was describing.

4. Sugar Cube Tower
In this activity the girls were given a box of sugar cubes and they had to make the tallest tower they could with them. If a tower reached 6 blocks and fell over, 6 was recorded as the highest and then they started again to see if they could beat that height. I think the highest they got to was around 15/16. This has always been a favourite amongst our girls although they always ask if they can eat the sugar even though it's been all over the floor!

5. Balloon keepy-uppy
The girls were given a balloon and were instructed to not let it touch the floor in the 5 minute period (although they weren't allowed to hold it.) It was quite interesting watching different sixes doing this activity - some had a system in which everyone was given an order and the balloon was passed around everyone and in others it was a free-for-all which resulted in tears from some of the younger (and therefore shorter) girls because the taller ones could reach the balloon first.

After all the girls had done all the activities they were given a piece of paper in their six and told to write down the shopping list form the beginning of the evening. Unsurprisingly, the groups who had shared out the items to remember did better than the groups who had all tried to remember it all.  Finally, we added up the points and announced the winner before the girls all went home.

This evening was interesting as I got to see how each six worked as a group and which sixers had good ideas. It was very intriguing to find out which girls were naturally good at working in a group and which ones weren't.