Patrol Planning

An important part of the Australian Guide Program is developing a shared leadership approach which basically means planning the program WITH the Guides. Not always the easiest endeavour! 

The Brownies are actively involved in creating our program each term with brainstorming nights where they discuss what activities and badges they want to do. The girls take turns leading songs and running games each week but usually only Patrol Leader's or the girls working on their Junior BP award run the programming for the entire night by themselves. So I really wanted to give the rest of the unit the chance to step up and have a greater degree of control in running our meetings.

Our Guide unit (10-14 year olds) runs extremely successful Patrol night's where each Patrol runs the program for the entire unit. So at our recent Leadership Training, I spoke to the Patrol Leader's and Seconder's and we decided to have each Patrol take turns running a 30 minute activity. If this is successful each Patrol will get to run an entire night in Term 3. The girls are desperate for this as increasing their activity to 1.5 hours means they can have a movie night. Apparently there is no limit to the amount of times they want to watch Frozen.

So much like GuideyDiary's unit, this week was all about the Brownie's planning activities as a Patrol. 

The Brownies split into their Patrols and began brainstorming. It was interesting to observe the different methods the girls chose for discussing their ideas. One Patrol had each girl create her own list with every possible activity she wanted to do. Another created one master list and then each girl had two votes to cull it down. The third Patrol discussed their ideas until coming to a consensus and I have no idea how the final Patrol made their decision, but by the time I made it to their group, they had their activity completely planned with equal input from each girl!

Below are the activities the girls chose to organise for their 30 minute activity.

Patrol One
Everybody dresses up (no theme, anything goes!) and brings in their rainbow looms and loom bands. Everybody can share their skills and teach others, with the Patrol members teaching specific styles of bracelets.

Photo credit: http://htekidsnews.com/rainbow-loom-mania-ask-the-creator/

Patrol Two
Every Patrol creates a skit with the title, Crazy Doctor! 

Patrol Three
Each Patrol is to create a skit with a funny twist eg. mixed up fairytales. The Patrols film their skit and then present the short film to the unit.

Patrol Four
The Patrol chose to begin the Food create-a-challenge badge. The girls planned two activities: a blind-folded taste test and the game, fruit salad. 

To make the taste test fair, they have decided to switch the dishes around so that everybody tries them in a different order. Below is the eclectic list of foods that will be used in the taste test. 

I find it interesting that dressing up and performing skits were such popular choices, especially since they weren't even brought up in our unit brainstorm! I'm excited to see what happens when the Patrols take over! Will chaos reign?