Francophone Books

Here's the link to the Quebec Council's shop webpage - where you can order the books!

We have a Francophone pair of sisters in our units this year.  I was talking to mum and dad at the end of October and realized that while they may speak ok English, they have a hard time reading in English, and the English books they'd gotten for their daughters were just kinda sitting around their house, not being read at all.  Let's face it - definitely at Spark age, and mostly at Brownie age, parents need to at least help their child read the books.

So how do we fix this problem?

I remembered reading (I can't remember where, might have been ANY Guide News, our Area Newsletter, The Guidepost or Canadian Guider) somewhere that there was a special printing of the Guide books (all of them, not just Sparks and Brownies) and that you could purchase them.


So I checked with Quebec - follow the link under the picture - you fill out their form, and (for a much higher fee) will send you the books that are in French!  I can't wait to see the smiles on their little faces!

As a warning, though, the books are expensive, as is the shipping fee.  I'll be contacting our provincial office on Monday to see if they'll subsidize the fee at all.  As leaders, however, we have decided that we will make sure the parents don't have to pay more than other parents do for the book.

Christmas Guider Meeting

For our Guider Meeting this year our Commissioner had a few cool ideas.

The first is that we were going to train right before the meeting.  Our training adviser spent the first half hour doing a SafeGuide training.  It's a great idea to put training in a Guider Meeting - first of all we are all there to begin with, and secondly - it's always important to do the training.  Makes it a bit easier to do the leading that we're trying to do!


Then we had our meeting.


Then we had a gift exchange.  For the gifts our challenge was that the gift we brought for exchange had to be handmade by us.  I made a scarf, and others bought homemade jams, chocolates, bubble bath, Christmas decorations, and a decorated planter with plant!

One of the other leaders made up a pass left/right game using all of our names and it was a blast!

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.