Gems of Guiding

Despite my excitement for the Discover-a-Challenge gemstone badges when they were first released many years ago, I have never had a Guide complete a single one of these badges. Although, we could do some of the challenges at Guides, it's really designed as a badge to complete at home. I've always had trouble with my unit accepting any sort of "homework". It makes planning difficult when only half the unit completes a challenge, and then everybody is at different stages.

I stopped giving my new members Guide handbooks as well, since nobody was bothering to look at them. So no-one in my current unit had ever previously seen the gemstone badges.

With no face-to-face meetings, I decided to my unit a weekly email with activities and updates. I broke the Topaz gemstone into four parts and included one part in the newsletter over a month. The first week, I included it was mostly as a filler, but the response I received the next week was so wonderful that I kept doing.

In that time, almost everybody had started their Topaz gemstone, and four have completed it!!
The level of work has been really fantastic as well!

I think this badge has been the perfect thing to keep the girl's off their devices after long days doing home-schooling. It's not too overwhelming to complete and is something that most won't need any assistance with.

Here is part one that I put in our newsletter.

And here is some art from challenge number one.

Still so much to learn

Things I have learnt during our online meetings:

• Turn off the chat and share-screen features at the beginning of the meeting.

• Teach your unit to use the mute feature, and ask that they keep themselves on mute unless called upon.

• Have the girl's teach each other. With members using various phones, laptops and other devices, I don't always know the answers. When we were originally figuring out settings, I had them teaching each other how to find different functions such as giving a thumbs up or changing their backgrounds. It's been a great way for them to share their knowledge and also makes things easier on me!

• Things will go wrong, and that's okay.

• Programmed activities will take longer than usual (and honestly, this is no different than our regular meetings).

• Try to keep some of your regular unit traditions when possible. We all wear Guide uniform and are continuing to sing our opening and closing songs, even though our timing never matches up.

• Have some quick activities ready to go in case you need a filler or a change of activity, just like at a regular meeting. Things that have worked well for us are Pictionary and a Kim's game. 

• End every meeting with a reminder on properly turning closing down Zoom, not just walking away from the iPad or closing the laptop screen.

What advice do you have for online meetings?

Girls online

Somehow, almost 5 years have gone by since I initially ran the Free Being Me program. How is that possible? Some of my former Brownies who completed the badge are now my Junior Leaders!

As always, reusing a program is always an experience. Things this time around have definitely been.... different. We've had quite a few challenges and interruptions this term (even prior to isolation), which put us a little behind on the planned schedule for FBM.

Anyway, I was a little apprehensive about moving the program to our online meetings, but the meeting went so well! It has renewed my excitement for the program, and I'm looking forward to figuring out how we can best work through the other activities using our online meeting format.

We're halfway through session three, and I'm continuing to take things slowly to make sure the program gets completed properly with everybody participating. Not ideal, but it's better than no-one gaining anything from the experience.

Our first activity was airbrushing and it was run almost exactly how I originally ran it. The actual activity in FBM is only a 10 minute activity, but I rounded it out to about 30-40 minutes. I'm so glad I did this again, because we had some really great discussions.

Zoom (the program we are using to host our meetings), allows users to share images and video. This was fantastic as every member had the airbrushing images appear on their screens. We had some great discussion, first playing a "spot-the-difference" challenge with the images and then answering the "Talk About" questions in the FBM program (page 25 of booklet).

We finished the meeting with a craft activity. I had emailed everybody a template to print and they provide their own magazines and colouring-in supplies from home.

The activity was to fill the figure with images that describes your personality. Some examples included: mountains for love of adventure and a bow-tie for silliness. There were some really creative final results!

I'm still working on everybody sending me photos of their work after meetings, but at least I get to see it during the meeting.

- Brownie Guide Leader

Online games

Even though we're on school holidays at the moment, the Brownies decided to continue with our meetings. I decided to keep things simple and hold a games night.

We started by playing bingo. Everybody drew a 5x5 grid on a piece of paper and then filled them with random numbers from 1-100. I pulled up a random number generator to chose our numbers, which I screen-shared with everyone. We played for one row and then a full board. It took forever to finish and I would definitely do it differently next time! (Luckily the girls still enjoyed the activity! I was ready to it finish it before we had even reached a bingo).

Things I would do differently next time:

• Not use a random number generator! It was fine at first, but then repeated numbers so many times it become really difficult to move on.
• Next time use an online bingo caller such as this one: https://letsplaybingo.io 
• I kept track of numbers as they came up, but next time I'd start with a list of all the numbers and cross them off as I went.

Some of the hand-drawn bingo boards:

 

Next up, we played Would You Rather? I asked the group random questions that I had found online, and they would raise their hand if they wanted to share their answer. They also had to share why they would choose one option over the other. It was a fun activity and it was a great hearing their responses.

The questions we used are below.

Would you rather:

• fly or be invisible?
• be a famous singer or a famous actor?
• be a fish or a bird?
• swim in a pool or jelly or a pool of custard?
• have a pet dinosaur or a pet robot?
• be a pilot or a pirate?
• read books or write stories?
• go to the moon or go to Disneyland?
• never shower again or never cut your nails again?

Our final activity was Pictionary. We used the whiteboard feature in Zoom, and the girls took turns to draw pictures with everyone else guessing. The only clue given was the topic. Our topics were: food, animals and movies.

Can you guess what these pictures are? 

A hamburger and a peacock!

A few regrets with my bingo choices, but other than than another fun-filled meeting! 

Edited to add:

What are the chances?! I was just reading about a virtual sleepover on The Guiding Life and they also played Pictionary and Bingo! This bingo caller is much more fun than the google number generator I used!

Wreath making meeting

Doing our best to keep to our program, we created Anzac Day wreaths during our final meeting of the term. This is one of my favourite activities of the year, as we don't usually make collaborative craft projects. Of course, this year we didn't create a wreath as a unit, but we did work simultaneously while making our own wreaths.

Most of the group made a cardboard base prior to the meeting, using cereal boxes. Then during the meeting, we looked at images of poppies, and I demonstrated methods to create your own leaves and flowers.

I just love the unique results!

Changes

During these difficult times, being able continue Guiding with my units has been a beacon of light. It's been a fun challenge and has kept me focused on something positive, for which I am so grateful.

I know that not everyone will feel this way, or have the time, means or even want to think about Guiding right now. But for me personally, this one act of normalcy each week helps and I can only hope that it is doing the same for at least some of my members.

We've been meeting online for about a month now and although it hasn't been easy, I've finished every meeting with renewed excitement.

I've kept it pretty simple and we're doing our best to keep working through our term programs, albeit with a completely different format.

During our first week, I held three different meetings for our units. Both the Brownies and the Guides had a lot of fun learning all the features of Zoom (the online platform we've been using), from changing backgrounds, taking control of the screen and sharing images. It was a fantastic and much needed lesson for me in learning how the security settings worked!

I hope that you and your families are safe and well.