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.

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.

Story Making and Pack Holiday Posters

13/09/18

This evening we started with a vote. Every year we do a sale (see here for a previous year's) to raise money for a charity. The last sale they did (while I was at university), we raised money for WWF so we could sponsor an animal. We have sponsored several animals in the past and always get a cuddly toy to go with it which then goes home with a different girl each week. We currently have a dolphin, a gorilla, and an elephant but the dolphin is getting a bit old and so we wanted to retire him to join the dog (they now sit under the toadstool) and get a new animal. I had looked online at the choices and chosen 5 to vote on: lion, panda, penguin, polar bear, and rhino. We printed out the picture of the toy onto paper which we spread round the room. Each girl was given 3 token, a red, a yellow and a blue. They then had to put the red token on their favourite, the yellow on their second choice and the blue on their third. I then counted up the votes - red getting 3 points, yellow getting 2 and blue getting 1. While I was counting, the girls sang 'Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar'. I then announced that the winner, who got 56 points, was the polar bear. We now just need to send off the money to the WWF and wait for the toy to arrive.

We then decided we would do another of the new programme UMAs - we chose 'Catch a Story' from the Express Myself theme. We had a small soft ball which we passed across the circle and each girl had to add a word to the story (we specified no rude words first!). Brown Owl started by saying 'Once' so that the next 3 would have to say 'upon a time' so that the girls got the idea and then we let it continue, with occasional prompting from leaders about the best word. If we did it again, we would definitely write the story down as we went along as by the end we couldn't remember the whole thing. We might also consider adding a time limit to the length of time a girl had to think of a word as we frequently got stuck waiting. We did eventually get a sort of story about a dog called Max who didn't like puppies because they were weird! I was quite impressed with some girls choice of words, we had a few say 'because' and 'however', although I would say it is an activity more suited to older girls as the younger ones were having trouble keeping up with what had laready been said and making sensible suggestions of words (we went round in circles at one point saying things the dog hated).

Once we had done that for around 15 minutes we stopped and got out some tables. We handed out various A5 pictures relating to the Olympics, there were some simple ones such as the rings, and some more complex ones like a man with an Olympic torch. These will form the decorations on pack holiday, and are also a great way to keep the noise down a little bit while we hold the parents meeting for girls who haven't been on pack holiday before. I sat on a table with some of the newer girls and coloured in my own picture, and got to know them a bit more.

This was quite a nice relaxed evening and went very smoothly. I always enjoy meetings where I can just sit and talk to girls and get to know them a bit more, especially with so many girls who've joined since I went away for university. And we always end up having some entertaining conversations, such as tonight when I was asked how old I was so I said "22" and one girl said "I think you look more like you're 23"!

First Meeting Back - Introducing the New Programme

06/09/18

This was our first meeting back after the summer and we thought we would take the time to introduce the girls to the new programme. We are going to be running a bit of a mixture while we, as leaders, get our heads round how it all works but we wanted to get the girls enthused from the beginning and help them understand the different themes a bit more. We also had a Scouting imposter this week - my other half (who's a Beaver Leader) came to the meeting as he is coming on pack holiday with us and we thought it best he meet the girls properly before then!

We started off by explaining to the girls in the pow wow that Guiding had changed the programme, which we told them meant that all the books and badges had changed, but that we would still do the same sorts of things in meetings. We then split them into their sixes and gave each six a pack containing all of the badges (just printed onto paper and cut out) and a badge book. We got them to group them into interest badges, skills builders, and theme awards. We then asked them to pick an interest badge which sounded interesting and find it in the book to decide if they would actually do it after reading the clauses. We had a few problems with them finding the badges in the books but once we pointed out there was a contents page at the front, they were fine! Quite a few, however, didn't understand what part they had to read to see what they had to do and a lot of them said "doI really have to read all of this?!". This was something us as leaders had picked up on when we first opened the books - it is very wordy for some of the younger girls and is not as clear as the old badges what the actual clause is.

We then collected in all the theme awards and put them to one side. The leaders all handed out skills builders and interest badges randomly, one to each girl. They then had to find a partner who had the other part of the theme award (we told them about the 4 hours of activities but didn't include it in the game). Once they were in a pair, one girl with an interest badge, and one with a skills builder, they could go and claim the theme award. We encountered a lot of confusion over which theme the badges were, as there are pale pink, dark pink, and purple ones, and the badges in each theme are not a uniform colour. I had already flagged this as a potential issue, and my suspicions were confirmed in this game! If they could not find a partner, they could go and swap their badge for a different one with a leader. We ended up strategically giving out badges to the last few girls to make sure they found a partner! Once they were in pairs, with a theme award between them, we then told them the requirements for the Brownie Gold badge. We then got them to get into a group of girls who could get the award, i.e. one of each theme award. There was mass confusion for a bit, especially in needing all 6 colours, not just 6 badges, and then we discovered that no one had gained the Express Myself theme award and so no one could get the Gold!

We then told the girls we were going to play a game which was part of the new programme. We chose 'Fox, Frog, Flea', from the Have Adventures UMAs. We gave up trying to explain food webs - the girls had heard of food chains but couldn't grasp the concept that it could be a web instead. We explained the rules - essentially you have 2 teams, they choose to be one of the three animals, each team lines up facing each other down the middle of the room and does the action associated with their animal, and then one chases the other according to the rules on the card with any girls that get caught swapping teams. The game itself went pretty well, although we started off with quite a few rounds which were draws which the girls thought was hilarious. The girls really seemed to enjoy it, but we did have to put a time limit on it instead of playing until all girls were on one team.

We then needed to sort out sixes for pack holiday which is coming up pretty soon. We have 3 sixes which are different to our regular meeting sixes so we named the three sixers and then asked the rest of the girls to split themselves evenly between them. Some years we specific that each six must have a certain number of girls who have been on a pack holiday before in them but this year we only have 5 of the 18 who have been before (of which, 3 are the sixers) so we let them just choose whoever they wanted to be with. They then had to choose a name for their six which fits in with our Olympics theme. We decided to go with Olympic sports instead of countries as last year we did Around the World. Luckily they chose pretty quickly, and we now have Swimming, Gymnastics, and Horse Riding. We made a note of who was in each six and then moved onto another part of the new programme.

We chose the 'Magic Moving Postcards' from the Express Myself UMAs. We got the girls into their actual sixes and gave them 15 minutes to come up with whatever they wanted. As leaders, we moved round the room settling small disagreements and giving suggestions. We then got each six to perform their mime and all the other girls had to guess where they had been and what they had done. There were a few slightly tenuous links but we guessed all of them eventually.

We had a few minutes to spare so we decided to play a game to end the meeting. We chose Pirates but decided not to get girls out and treat it as a practice game for the new girls to learn how to play as we didn't have enough time to get all the girls out.

This was a great first meeting back, it is nice to see all the girls again, especially as I have been away at university and haven't seen them as regularly, although there are a lot of new faces and names to learn! Our first foray into the new programme wasn't too bad, but it will take time to get used to having prescribed activities to do rather than free reign to do whatever we want all the time. The girls seemed to enjoy the activities we did, although they did also seem a bit confused to start, but that will work itself out, especially once we have made our sticker chart for the new programme (we have ones for the Adventure badges and they work really well as a visual aid to the girls).