Friday, March 25, 2016

Building Birdhouses

Our local Home Depot no longer offers Birdhouse Building classes for kids.  They do, however, have boxes of these birdhouses in the back and were more than happy to let us build some on our own!

We used this as a great opportunity for our Brownies to bring their parents with them to help build the birdhouses.  We did ask them to make sure that the Brownies were doing the work - not their parent!






Brown Owl, bless her, had a bunch of different high-quality paints to paint them with.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Multifaceted Training 2016



A few weekends ago I got to go to a Guider training weekend in Red Deer, called Multifaceted.  On top of being an awesome weekend of friends, training and fun, we got a crest for going!

There were five sessions, and I got to learn about Adventure Camping, Food for Adventure Camping, Volunteer Management, Financials, and learned a bit about Building Strong Teams.  As a whole group we played around the world in 80 minutes, learned a bit about a bunch of different countries' Guiding traditions, made some awesome crafts and shared them with each other, and had a great big campfire!

A great idea the organizers had was a silent auction of old badges - they asked those who came to donate old badges they didn't need any more, and the proceeds were donated to CWFF.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Cookies Rising 2016

One of the awesome things about Canadian Guiding is the Cookies Rising badges.  They're for the girls to learn about marketing, money management, and customer service!  


My daughter has a Money in the Bank kit - it has all the different Canadian coins, as well as 5 and 10 dollar bills.  I printed out even smaller twenties for them to use.

We split the girls into four groups.

At my table, the girls practiced making change for cookie orders.  One girl would pretend to buy the number of boxes I told her to, a second would make the change and say thank you and a third would observe.

Next to me, Sparkle Owl helped the girls make advertising posters for our cookie booth.

Then Brown Owl talked to the girls about safe cookie selling and how to keep themselves safe.

Finally, Snowy Owl and Baby Owl taught the girls some cookie songs.




We had enough time at the end for Baby and Snowy Owls to teach them how to tie a bedroll up, and for us to talk to the Brownie Parents about our camp next month.

Friday, March 4, 2016

I Can!

We did the second half of Key to I Can tonight.  We also did what many leaders tremble to teach - sewing!  (Which was a lot of fun!)  For this activity, it is important to make sure that you have enough needles for ALL the girls.  I only had a dozen, which meant that a few girls needed to wait and/or trade off needles with other girls.

I used one of the needles to freehand each girl's initials on a card.




In the future, I'd buy all the same colour of thread, and start them all before the girls got to them.

Brown Owl and Sparkle Owl helped the girls make stamped wrapping paper at the second station.

Please note - this took all the leaders helping out with the sewing, and the girls being awesome and patient - but they all got them completed!  Huzzah!

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Special Days Badge

We did the Special Days badge last week.  Hey - Leap Year only happens once a year, so why not have them work on it now?

We first talked about different Special Days for all of us.  Birthdays, anniversaries, first and last days of school, holidays etc.  Then we split into two groups.

Brown Owl and Tawny Owl talked to the girls about China, and made a Chinese lantern.

Sparkle Owl and I took the other group.  Sparkle Owl is from the Lakes district in the UK - I spent three years in India.  We had pictures of our travels and talked about special days that happen in those countries.  Sparkle Owl talked about Guy Fawkes day and recited the rhyme "Remember Remember" and I talked about Holi.  If you're looking to talk to your girls about those holidays, search terms "India, Holi" or "England, Guy Fawkes" on Youtube!

Then we switched!

The girls got to vote on how they'd like to celebrate their "bonus day" in 2016.  They decided leap frog was the best idea on how to celebrate leap day.  So we played leap frog.

Muttart Conservatory and Alberta Girl Guide House

Sorry I haven't kept up this month - I had houseguests!  But now they're gone and I can get back to it!

A few weeks ago we went to Edmonton's Muttart Conservatory in the morning, and then the Alberta Girl Guide House in the afternoon.

Amazingly enough, our facilitator at the Muttart was ALSO a Spark leader!  So she knew exactly what the girls would like to learn, and had a great way about her.  The girls were happy and relaxed with her from the very beginning.

We did the Ladybugs & Friends program.  We got a tour of each of the four pyramids (Rainforest, Desert, Temperate and Feature), and there was a game for the girls to participate in in each pyramid as well.  They got to put on glasses that made the world look like it does to a bee, search for matching ladybugs, learn about the different shapes of cacti, learn about plants that humans can eat, and, in the feature pyramid, they got to release their very own ladybug!


My ladybug - I called her Emily.


The feature pyramid had the theme of Chinese New Year - Year of the Monkey.


The girls also got to pot a small plant to take home with them.  Mine are currently sitting on my windowsill and growing really well!  All the girls earned the Key to the Living World: Special Interest Badge for this!

This was a WONDERFUL program.  The girls were happy and engaged for 2.5 hours, and it wasn't expensive either!


We ate lunch on the bus between the Muttart and Alberta's Girl Guide House.  Once we got to the Girl Guide house, the girls learned a bit about how the House got built, and why it's important to Alberta Girl Guides.  We learned that you can spend the night in the basement (which sounds awesome).  Then the girls got to put on historical costumes.  We had enough girls, and the right sizes to have everything from the early mustard dresses with bucket hats to the 2005 uniform of blue and orange shirt with a sparkly Brownies across the chest and a skort.


They also got to find Fiona Mouse, and had a scavenger hunt through the archives.