Campfire cooking indoors

Bushfire season is not a great time to plan an outdoor fire, and with fires sweeping the state, we had to move our plans indoors.

I've never eaten an oven cooked damper, but it tastes really good! Of course, nothing can beat the charcoal taste when you slightly burn your damper-on-a-stick over an open fire.

Cuddly koalas (a very misleading song!)

It's not often that a meeting involves meeting a koala, but it definitely makes it memorable!

How much do my friends know about me?

As I mentioned in my post about the Junior BP Award, one of the girl's created a 'true and false' quiz, to use towards her Patrol System challenge.

In Aim High (badge book) the challenge is written as: 

Learn more about the members of your Patrol and present this information in a fun way.

How to play:

1. Every person in the Patrol is given a worksheet.
2. Complete each question, listing one correct answer and one misleading (false) answer.
3. The first boxes are blank, so that you can choose your own question to complete.
4. List the other participants in your Patrol at the top of the columns on the right side of the page.
5. Take turns with the other members of your Patrol guessing which of your answers is true and which is false. 
6. Reveal your answers, keeping score as your go.
7. Take time to discuss your answers as you play. Ask follow up questions! Share your own interests to learn more about your Patrol.
8. Don't forget to laugh and have fun!


Example worksheet:

The Patrol feedback was 100% positive when discussing and assessing whether the 
challenge had been completed correctly and to Miss-10-year's highest personal standard. The Patrol stayed entertained with this activity for at least 30 minutes and definitely came out of it with stronger bonds, knowing more about each others interests. A great success!

Full credit for this activity goes to Miss-10-years, who gave me permission to share her activity with other Leader's.

Challenge Yourself

This term has been focused on individual badge work, with the majority of the unit working towards the peak achievement award, the Junior BP Award. 

It has been a really strange term for me as a Leader, as I have had little to no preparation needed for each meeting. It's both lovely and unsettling at the same time. I just get to turn up and then circulate the room, helping where needed, while leaving a parent to stay at one base (usually the kitchen, if there is cooking).

Any Brownie Guide can present a challenge for their Junior BP Award or any other badge from Look Wide (badge book), as long as she has given me two weeks notice. 
Most challenges are being presented to a single Patrol so that four different girl's can be presenting their badge work simultaneously. Some girl's have now completed up to three challenges, others a single challenge and a few have been content to just turn up to the meeting and enjoy what has been planned for them.

I expected there to more discontent about participating in every activity, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how mature the unit has been. During one meeting, the activities that the four different Patrols were working on were: cooking fudge, drawing cartoons, sewing and a Patrol quiz and discussion. Each group stayed happily at their activity for up to an hour! It does help that everyone cooking has been making enough food to share with everybody at the end of the night. I don't know how we'll cope next term without our weekly snack! 


So far the activities have included:




Junior BP Award Challenges




Promise and Law




Challenge: Share your talent with your Patrol

•   Teaching Patrol to draw cartoons

•   Cooking wantons

•   Baking caramel fudge

•   Sewing bookmarks - with buttons and fabric scraps

Guiding Traditions

Challenge: Choose your own challenge

•   Organised a unit meeting with the theme Guiding traditions. This meeting was organised by three girls and included first aid, morse code, world centres and knotting - with some tasty treats at the end!

•   Plan a Promise ceremony and teach the original Brownie Story

World Guiding

Challenge: Learn a game from another country. Teach your unit.

•   Taught a game from Africa – the game involved locating hidden coins. I had been doing paperwork and missed the instructions, so ended up messing up the first round of the game when I found a coin and gave it to a Brownie sibling, not realising it was an integral part of the game!

Patrol System

Challenge: Learn more about the members of your Patrol and present this information in a fun way.

•   Patrol ‘truth and lie’ quiz – this was a really great and well-planned activity.

Challenge: Choose your own.

·    •   Teach Patrol to cook damper over a fire.

Camp cooking

Chicken stir-fry followed by dumplings for dessert. Yum!

Mbube Mbube - African game

This is a fun game led by one of the girl's as a Junior BP challenge. Everyone really enjoyed it, and they played it through many times. 

World Guiding - learn a game from another country and teach it to your unit. 

New in 2016

New flavours of Guide biscuits will be available in 2016, so I'm preparing our order and trying to estimate how our sales will be affected by different flavours and prices.

I'm hoping that the change is successful for two reasons:

1. I've always loved our chocolate biscuits - especially when making s'mores so i'm slightly devastated that I won't be able to have them anymore. Hopefully these new flavours will win me over!

2. This is the only fundraiser we do for our unit, all other fundraising is for charitable organisations. It's nice to have that extra bit of money the account to assist the Guides with paying for expensive events and camps.

Non-Formal Education through Girl Guides

Have a look at your term program. Do you focus on all of these methods of learning at least once? I know, that sometimes it can be a struggle when you are trying to get through a certain amount of programming in such a short time frame!

Credit: WAGGGS

Read more about how Girl Guiding teaches youth through non-formal education on the WAGGGS website. 

This example from the WAGGGS resource, 'Prepared to Learn, Prepared to Lead', demonstrates how a Free Being Me session applies the GG and GS educational method.

WAGGGS: Prepared to Learn, Prepared to Lead resource (page 35) 

Beautiful People

After we completed session three (part two) of Free Being Me, we had some extra time, so we were able to work on the extra activity I had prepared.

Girlguiding UK has a great badge program called Go For Its! This activity was found in the Life Wise activity pack and is listed under the Wellbeing activities (pages 2-11), which align really well with the Free Being Me program.

The activity for Beautiful People is listed on page 2 and is activity number four.  The template is available on page 3. I adapted the activity slightly, as I had the girl's represent themselves, rather than an imaginary person.

Activity:
Create the beautiful person you are using images from magazines to represent your personality.  You can use any images except for those with people in them.

Here are some of the pictures that the girl's created. I think if I did this with older Guides they may be more concerned about staying within the lines, but the Brownies didn't mind. They really enjoyed this activity and had really great discussion about their personality traits!

Note: I ripped pages out of magazines ahead of time with images of nature, bright colors, animals etc. I knew the girl's would be distracted by adverts, celebrities etc. I'm glad I did, because they stayed on topic the entire time.

I definitely recommend this activity if you have the time! 

Secret messages to make someone's day!

Remember those great 'treasure inside of me' boxes that the girl's made for the initial Free Being Me meeting? As we have completed the FBM program, it's probably time to show you what was inside!

Read the original post about the boxes here.

Here are some excerpts, to give you an idea of the lovely messages that were written.

I hope these messages give the girl's a pick-me-up when they need it and remind them of their amazing lifelong 'sisters'!

Leader's Only

 Campfires, bell tents, building, cooking, chatting, eating, sharing and laughing.

WAGGGS and World Centres

WAGGGS has updated their website! Information is still being added, so hopefully the program ideas that used to be on the individual World Centre websites will be added soon.

In the meantime, here are the current resources available.

Image credit: WAGGGS.org

And i'm sure that everybody has heard that our fifth World Centre has been named!

From the WAGGGS website:

The new name, Kusafiri translated from Swahili, means 'journey' was chosen to represent and embody the Girl Guiding and Scouting journey as we deliver trainings, workshops and sessions to our members throughout the Africa region.  

Eyes

I received an email today about a fun new resource from BadgeFreaks - the Blindness Awareness Activity Pack. It would be perfect to use for the Eyes create-a-challenge badge!

The pack includes information about Braille, Guide dogs, colour blindness, health and preventention, group discussion questions and games to play with your unit.

Credit: BadgeFreaks

This is definitely a great starting point towards the eyes badge. I especially like the discussion questions that are included.

Excerpt from activity pack:

Credit: BadgeFreaks

A slightly different arrangement

Not quite the tune or lyrics that we sing at our campfires, but perhaps that makes it better. Enjoy!

Thoughts?

Beauty comes from deep within

This is part two of Free Being Me, session three. If you've read my earlier posts, you know that this session was not completed in one night for a variety of reasons. If you missed session three - part one, I recommend that you read that post first. 


Change the Media

In our previous meeting, each Patrol had been given just under 10 minutes to begin preparations for 'taking over the media'. During this meeting, they were given another 15 minutes to get their ideas together before presenting their final product to the unit. The presentations were great - on topic and completely unique! Two of the groups even requested to use images from our airbrushing activity!

I have to admit that while watching these presentations, I definitely had my proud Leader moment of 'Wow, these girl's are really getting this!'

I managed to take some photographs of the draft outlines as seen below. 

A magazine article:

An original song:

A news report (with a very dramatic reading!):

An advert for television, including a catchy jingle and dance number:

For my drama-loving Junior Guides, this was a great activity for them to share everything that they had learnt over the past three meetings.

Personal Challenge: You're My Star

Each girl created a star with a positive message written inside, that challenged the idea that everyone should look a certain way. The personal challenge component, was to take these home at the end of the meeting to display where others would be able to read them.

Some of the stars (before they were cut out):

And my personal favourite:

You're My Star was the final activity to complete session three. We had additional time in the meeting, so ended with a great craft project I discovered through one of the GirlGuiding UK's GFI programs. (Thanks Snowflake, for helping me discover these!) Since this has already been such a photo heavy post, i'll post the about this separately.

Back in the swim of things

Sangam World Centre's new pool is complete and ready for all future visitors to enjoy!

Donations are still being accepted for pool construction, so please consider helping out with the last bit of fundraising needed! Donate HERE.

Here is the new pool in all its glory. Don't worry, the surrounding landscape has also been finished, just keep scrolling.

Credit: Sangam World Centre

Screenshot: Sangam World Centre

Were you there for the virtual pool party hangout to celebrate the new pool? If not, you can watch it all on Youtube!

In Memoriam:

Sangam's former pool had been operational since 1974.

-------------------------------------

Have you been fortunate enough to swim in either of Sangam's pools?

NOTE: After my last post, I discovered this cute Warli Art version of the Sangam logo that I had to share.

Credit: Sangam World Centre

Indian traditions: Warli art

I love art projects, so choosing to teach the girl's about the Warli tribe and their traditional art wasn't even a question during our Indian term.

The Warli people are from the state of Maharashtra, mostly located on the northern outskirts of Mumbai. Rather than depicting deities, their art tells a story of moments in everyday life such as hunting, dancing and harvesting. Warli art was traditionally painted on the inside walls of mud huts, usually for a celebration such as a marriage.

Have a look at this Indian Warli Art website for more information.


Our meeting began as you may have guessed, with a discussion and photo slideshow. Why mess with something that is working well? It gives me a chance to share information with the girls and they love to see the real-life examples on the computer screen. It has worked wonders for imparting the "learning material" this term!

Here is some Warli art painted on the wall at Sangam's entrance.

After looking at examples of and discussing Warli art, we moved onto the practical portion of the meeting. 

I demonstrated to the girl's how to draw different people and objects in the Warli style. We began with the basic person standing and then worked our way through a variety of poses - walking, running and sitting to name a few.

My photo, not my drawings.

As I drew on the whiteboard, the Brownie's followed along, drawing on pieces of paper. Other objects we drew included: 

• trees
• sun, moon, clouds, stars
• campfire
• line of people dancing
• musical instruments

Some Brownie drawings. It's merely a coincidence that I only took photos of drawings that used blue texta. The was a rainbow of colour used, I just didn't capture it.

Once everybody had learnt the basics, it was time to move onto the painting. Each girl had a 12x12 inch piece of calico on which to paint. I had purchased thin-tipped paint brushes to make painting the fine details easier.

While traditionally, the Warli tribe used white for their painting, calico was the easiest and cheapest material for us to paint on and so we painted with black paint. If I had more time at my disposal, I would have liked to paint the calico beforehand to imitate the red ochre walls of the Warli mud huts.

I asked the girl's to plan their paintings before touching the paint and to think about the story that they wanted to tell.

Here are some of the final designs:

This was a meeting where we could have easily kept going for another hour. The Brownies were completely enthralled the entire time, and I think they really enjoyed the simple tricks used to easily recreate the Warli designs. An A+ meeting!