Meeting #13: Traveller/Cultural Awareness

Traveller badge (T)

Cultural Awareness badge (CA)

Curacao Twinning Challenge

6:30-7:00: Patrol Time--In Curacao they have Carnivale in February, much like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. One thing they do during Carnivale is have a song contest, so we had the Patrols create songs and we're going to have the contest next week.

7:00-7:15: Horseshoe--During Horseshoe, we discussed various organizations that can help travellers. The girls came up with travel agencies, and we talked about Expedia that they used last week. Then we also discussed places like CAA, the Government of Canada Travel website, and Embassies in other countries. (T#1)

7:15-7:30: Airline tickets: We taught them how to read an airline boarding pass and the departure board. We had a sample ticket to show them how to read them, and then we handed them each a boarding pass to Curacao. There were 5 different flights, with different gates, and different seats. We called the flights and boarded by seat number (Now boarding rows 15-30). They also had to show their passports from last week, just like boarding an airplane. (T#3)

Boarding Pass Sample
Departure Board
Curacao Boarding Passes

Once we had them all lined up, two Guiders flew them out of the room and down the hall while two of us decorated the classroom with a couple of posters and leis and grass skirts so when the girls came back into the room, they were in Curacao! Their tables were now their "hotel rooms" and their chairs were their "beds". They totally bought into it, and whenever I said "table" by mistake, they'd reply "You mean our hotel rooms!"

7:30-7:40: Dance--We did a Welcome Dance on the Island, called "I Let Her Go Go" which was recommended on the Girl Guides Blog about the Curacao Twinning Challenge. The song was fairly easy for the girls to learn. The clapping and turning took a little bit to get onto, but it was a lot of fun. (CA#4)

7:40-8:00: Curacao Trivia--We read a story written by Wendy Baker that was posted in the Girl Guide Unofficial Facebook page. The story has trivia questions at the end. We asked each Patrol (hotel room) a question and they could confer with each other. If no one in that group could answer, the other Patrols could steal the question. The winning Patrol got to take home the decorations--leis, grass skirts, posters. (CA#1, #3, #6)

8:00-8:15: Dance--Caimarusa (links to mp3), again recommended on the Girl Guides Blog and explained by Guiding with Jewels. We listened to the song twice, then sang it ourselves, and then played the game. We had 24 girls tonight, so we had to sing an extra half verse of the "la la las" to get everyone through. While we enjoyed both dances, this was the favourite of the two. (CA#4)

8:15-8:30: We were going to sing some campfire songs, but they wanted to work on their songs for the contest, so they spent a few more minutes working on their songs before we had our closing.

Meeting #12: Curacao Twinning Challenge/Travel Badge

Curacao Twinning Challenge 

Travel badge (T)

You in Guiding: Learn about WAGGGS (YiG3)

In looking at the Curacao Twinning Project, I thought there was a way we could incorporate the activities in the Travel badge and the Cultural Awareness badge. So we're going to spend three meetings on Curacao and hopefully earn a bunch of program!

(As an aside, has anyone else noticed that the Travel badge skipped #5 and only has 7 requirements?)

6:30-7:00 Patrol Time: Fill out a Child's Canadian Passport application. I printed off a copy for each girl to fill out. They fill out so few forms on their own that it took them a while to get through this. Not many had finished by the time we called horseshoe! (T#4)

7:00-7:10 Horseshoe

7:10-8:10 Once girls completed filling out their passport applications, we gave them a Passport to Curacao, with a number of activities to complete. We set up stations and let them wander on their own and complete their passports at their own pace. A few of the stations required leader guidance. We took their picture so they could glue them into their passports.

Curacao passport (Word doc)

Station one involved deciding which attractions to do while in Curacao (T#2) and then figuring out the costs in Curacao money and converting the costs to Canadian money (T#6).

I researched the attractions ahead of time and printed them off for the girls to pick from. They also need a calculator to help with the currency conversion.

Curacao Attractions (Word doc)

I printed off the first four pages of the Twinning Challenge and the girls had to look through the pages and find the answers to the questions. (T#2)

I found this mapping activity on the internet. It was a way for the girls to learn a little bit about the island and where it is in relation to Nova Scotia.  (T#2)

Since we have WiFi at the school, we brought in four laptops that we set up so the girls could learn how to book things on Expedia and get an idea of how much flights and hotels cost.

We let girls work in twos to find their flights.  (T#2)

There was also a flag in the passport that the girls could colour when they finished the other stations or were waiting for a station to be free.




8:15-8:30 Learn the Promise and the language. The final two pages in the passport had the Curacao promise written in Papiamentu and the translation. We read the Promise in English and discussed the differences between their Promise and ours. (YiG3#1)

And finally, I found a song in Papiamentu called Fire's Burning. The English translation isn't anything like ours but the rhythm fits with ours. So we learned to sing it in Papiamentu. We're going to do it the next few meetings, and hopefully we'll know it well enough to teach it to our District at our Thinking Day party.