Meeting #1: Welcome to Guides!

Another year of Guiding is starting again. And we have 28 girls this year! Oh my.

 Arrival (15 min): We just let the girls mill about and talk to each other as they arrived and we collected dues and health forms from the parents.

 Introductions (5 min): We had all the girls introduce themselves and tell us how many years they've been in Guiding. We handed out nametags that we'd pre-made.

 Ice breaker games (10 min): We didn't do anything new this year. We played the toe-basher game from last year and the girls had lots of fun with it again. We also did the line up in alphabetical order without talking game. They were a lot better at it this year!

 Guide Programming (5 min): We discussed the Guide program book, the Program squares, the badges, the girl-led concept and how they can help us make decisions.

 Guide Key Words (10 min): We played a scramble game with them. For each word, we printed them out in colour and then glued them to the same colour construction paper and cut the letters up individually.

Each group had a colour assigned, and they had to look for the different letters strewn around the room. Once they unscrambled the words, we talked about each word and how they apply to the Guide Program. CAMPING
OUTDOORS
ENVIRONMENT
COMMUNITY
INDEPENDENCE

  Word doc with Coloured Words (from dropbox)

 Theme Planning (10 min): We gave each group a sheet of paper with the letters of the alphabet and asked them to come up ideas/themes/activities that we could do throughout the year.

 Science badge planning (5 min): Again, we had the girls plan which science badge we would do through the Supernova program at Dalhousie University. We voted and the Astronomy badge won, so we'll go to the Planetarium. Yay!

Bookmark Craft: We did this one from the Castlegar Guides page. We`re going to make lap books, an idea I got from Owl and Toadstool and this will be the first thing we`ll put into it.  (More on the lap books in a couple of weeks.) So we gathered up the crafts at the end.  We realized we should have done these earlier in the meeting to give the glitter glue time to dry.

We used fun foam for the background, and used a globe instead of HELP, to represent the new promise.

After they cleaned up after the craft, we had a few minutes left, so we sang some songs--Sixties Party, Yogi Bear, and When Bubbles Was A...-- and then we did the squeeze and sang Taps.

All in all, we had a great night. We seem to have a good group of girls so far. We have two more girls asking to join our group and at this point, what's the difference between 28 & 30? No more than 30--5 Patrols of 6 is probably the most we'd want. It's just hard to say  no to girls who want to be Guides! (We have 5 leaders, so we should be okay.)