Meeting #18: Food Bank Volunteering

You in Guiding: Be Involved in Your Community (YiG4)

Outing! We went to Feed NS and spent 90 minutes sorting food into various categories. They sorted 2 and a half pallets of food that will be distributed to families across Nova Scotia. The girls had a great time and worked hard all night. I always love this as a Community Service Project. (YiG4#3)

Special Event #4: District Thinking Day Swimming Party

You in Guiding: Learn About Guiding (YiG2)

For Thinking Day, all levels--Sparks to Pathfinders--were invited to a Swimming Party! We booked the Wave Pool, and the girls  were in the pool for about an hour.

After swimming, we had the Community Room for our party. The Third Year Guides each created Lady Baden Powell posters to hang around the room as part of their LBP award.

When the girls first arrived in the room, we handed out Get to Know You Bingo cards. We paired the Sparks up with Guides to help with the reading. We also gave them all Girl Guides pencils to keep (Thinking Day Bingo Word doc) (YiG2#3)

Then we had pizza and juice for everyone, and ended with cupcakes. We sang Happy Birthday to Lord and Lady Baden Powell.

A good time was had by all!

Meeting #17: You and Others--Safety Posters

You and Others: Build Skills in Communication (YaO2)
You and Others: Learn About Safety (YaO4)

6:30-7:00--Patrol Time: The girls brought in their CWFF Banks that they made in the fall, but now they were full of pennies! Each Patrol rolled their pennies and each group shared and compared how much they each collected at Horseshoe.

7:00-7:10--Horseshoe

7:10-7:25--We talked about making a poster and how to effectively communicate an idea. We talked about use of colours, size of text, etc. (YaO2#3)

7:25-8:00--The girls broke up into groups of 2 or 3. They could pick any topic of safety that they wanted. We talked about safety ideas--water safety, street safety, on-line safety, car safety, etc. (YaO4#3)

8:00-8:15--Each group presented their poster and then the rest of the group guessed what their message was and talked about what was effective and what wasn't effective. Again, we talked about colours and text and what works in a poster. The girls did a great job of critiquing each poster, and we emphasized constructive criticism and giving positive feedback with the negative. (YaO2#3)

8:15-8:30--We sang a few songs before closing.

Meeting #16: WAGGGS Square

You in Guiding: Learn About WAGGGS (YiG3)

After spending the last few meetings visiting an international country, we decided to conclude with a meeting about WAGGGS!

6:30-7:00: Patrol Time: We used a printout I got from Guider LeeAnne* at the Owl and Toadstool blog. It's a strip of international uniforms that the Guides can colour in. There is a numbered guide to tell them which colour goes where. They were very industrious and got right down to work on it. They fanfolded the strip of paper and glued it into their lapbooks before we had horseshoe. (YiG3#5)

7:00-7:15: Horseshoe: We are thinking about doing the Operation Earth Action challenge and so we presented it to them to see if it was something they were interested in. (Thumbs up!) Then we told them we could use half an hour in our next meeting to celebrate Valentine's Day at our next meeting, and let them plan and decide what they wanted to do (a treasure hunt, baked goods, and a dance party--they are bringing the music and the disco balls!)

7:15-7:35: World Trefoil: We precut puzzle for each girl. I got the puzzle template from Guider LeeAnne* at the Owl and Toadstool. These puzzle were very small and tedious to cut out. We split the chore up between two Guiders (and a helper daughter Guide) but they were a lot of work and I don't know that I'd do these again. I like that they have these in their lapbooks, but did I mention it was a lot of work? :) It was nice to change up the activity though and the girls did have fun gluing the puzzles together! (YiG3#4)

7:35-8:05: World Center Passports: Guider LeeAnne created the original, but before she sent me all of her files, I recreatd the passport for our purposes. We did use her posters though! The girls wandered the room and filled in their passports, learning about the World Centers along the way. (YiG3#2)

Owl and Toadstool Posters (webpage to download)
World Centers Passport (Word doc)

8:05-8:20: We played the World Centers fact cooperative game that we did last year. We wanted to see how the dynamics worked again. A few of them seemed to grasp the way to get to stop hopping was to convince everyone to go to the same one, but our two obstinate girls from last year haven't learned anything! One refuses to move with the group if she thinks she right, even though by moving, they could find out they were wrong and then move to the right spot. The other is with the group as long as there are a few holdouts in another location--as soon as the holdouts look like they're going to join the goup, this Guide will move to another location just to keep everyone jumping! We've decided to not do this game again until those two have moved on!

8:20-8:30: Closing--we handed out lots of badges tonight. If a girl had attended the past four meetings, she'd have earned the Travel badge, Cultural Awareness badge, the Curacao Twinning Challenge, and her WAGGGS square! Everyone received at least the Twinning Challenge crest, so no one went away empty handed!

*To get copies of the files I got from Guider LeeAnne, comment on her blog or send her an email.

Meeting #15: Curacao Twinning/Cultural Awareness

Curacao Twinning Challenge

Cultural Awareness (CA)

Patrol Time: They continued working on songs for the Carnivale Song contest.

Craft: To get ready Carnivale, we made Carnivale masks! We pre-traced glasses onto fun foam. The girls cut them out and they hot-glued a chopstick onto the side to be the stick to hold them to their faces. Then we had jewels and sparklies and feathers for them to decorate them. They had a great time! (CA#1, CA#5)

Song Contest: Next up was the song contest and they did a great job on them! They incorporated facts that they'd learned in the previous meetings and made up tunes. There were funny ones and raps and overall, I was very impressed with their creativity. (CA#1, CA#2, CA#5)

Food: Finally we had come Caribbean food to end the night.

Pumpkin Pancakes: We used the recipe from the Twinning Challenge but we had some difficulty cooking them. The batter was quite wet and they were still wet once they were cooked. But the girls ate them and the flavour was good.

Fried Plantain: We fried up slices of plantain. Some girls like it and some girls didn't. Though they look like bananas, they taste a lot like potatoes. Deep-fried, they're like potato chips!

Iguana soup!--This was mentioned in story we'd read, so our Cook Master whipped some up for the girls to try. She added green food colouring to chicken and made chicken noodle soup and we told them it was Iguana soup. Once they tasted it, a number of girls insisted it was chicken noodle soup, but we never told them the truth.

Sunchis: I had made these meringues (scroll down) the week before, but then we had to cancel for snow. I didn't think they'd last another week, so I took them to work for people there to eat. They were good and quite sweet and the girls would have liked them, I'm sure. Our girl who moved away had lots of foods she couldn't eat, so they would have been good for her, but since she wasn't at this meeting, I wasn't as concerned at making sure we had enough that she could try.

So now we're done with Curacao! When we told the girls, they said we hadn't flown back yet, so we may need to fly them down the hallway next week to get them back to Nova Scotia!

Special Event #3: Winter Hike

Beyond You: Explore the Outdoors and Nature (YiG2)

Since we had to cancel our meeting due to snow, we arranged for a hike on Saturday. We had a girl moving away and we wanted a chance to say good-bye to her before she moved to New Mexico.

It was cold and there was lots of snow on the ground, but it was sunny and there wasn't much wind at all, so it was a beautiful day for a hike.

We had one girl who started complaining about 15 minutes into a 2 hour hike, but we got her through it. We stopped every 15 minutes or so for a water break, and at the halfway turnaround point, we stopped for a snack.

As we walked, we looked for interesting things along the way. We saw a river that was still running, and dogs, and animal prints in the snow, and ducks swimming in the water. (YiG2#1)

On our return, our complaining girl walked at the front and stopped complaining, and said that the snack break was enough and her legs didn't hurt anymore. We think knowing how far she had to walk back helped her--though she did declare that she was never going on a hike again!

We had a great time in the beautiful outdoors!

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.