Thinking Day 2015 - Guiding Lights

So the theme for this year's Thinking Day (according to the Canadian Girl Guides) is Guiding Light.  I decided to run with the theme, so here's what we did to celebrate Thinking Day 2015!

When we arrived, I gave the girls page 58 out of the Spark book and asked them to imagine themselves as A BROWNIE and to draw what they thought they'd look like.  Several had rainbows across their shirts - very cute.  Since we opened our doors and had some Brownies attending, they drew themselves as Guides.

Then I told them the story of Lord Baden Powell and Lady Baden Powell from the Spark Leader's guide.  It's the story of those very first Girl Scouts who showed up at the Crystal Palace Jambouree.  One of the Sparks asked me if it was a real story or made up.  :-)

Then it was time for our craft.  We made our own little Guiding Lights to shine around the world.  For this craft I went onto Ebay and bought 500 random world stamps.  There are dealers who will just ship you 500 for about $5, shipping included.  These are really rare or valuable stamps, but we got a good selection of stamps (the mess of stamps below).  There were stamps from all the different continents!

Then I passed out modge podge and paint brushes, and let the kids pick out their own stamps.  The trick is to put the glue on the glass, add the stamp, then paint over the whole thing with more glue.  The Brownies loved this (they were also earning their terrific trash badge), and we asked the girls other ways they could recycle stuff in their homes.  Some had great ideas like painting a chipped plate so it was more like a painting and hanging it up, to composting.  

Here are some pictures of the process.

Oh, then we added glitter on top of the stamps and glue - because everything is better with glitter.
The light is one of the flickering battery-operated tea lights from the dollar store.

Then we sang a Guiding Light song - to be perfectly honest, it was "this little light of mine", but with the words changed to be "This Guiding Light of Mine".

Finally, since the Brownies were there, they showed us their puppet play, for their badge, since they'd completed the rest of it the previous meeting at Brownies.  They showed us the Guides of New Zealand climbing a mountain to light the first campfire of Thinking Day, starting the light of Guiding as it moves around the world.