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.

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.

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!

Cupcakery Fun!

Last night the girls got to go to a local cupcake shop and try their hands out at decorating cupcakes.  They had a blast!

They got to tour the kitchen (the mounds of butter they use every day shocked them), and got a demonstration of how to decorate the cupcakes then got two cupcakes to decorate themselves.  They had plastic piping bags for buttercream icing, balls of fondant to roll out (and moulds to shape it in), candies, and a variety of shaping tools to use on the fondant like clay.

The shaker is for cornstarch - you need to sprinkle it over the mould and over the fondant as otherwise it can (and will) stick to everything.


A few tips for fellow leaders - ask the girls NOT to wear their sashes and scarves.  Either they get icing on them, or end up touching them to adjust them and then need to wash their hands again.  Also, the place we went has a lot of experience giving these kinds of programs for birthday parties, so they were really on the ball - but you wouldn't want inexperienced bakers with the girls.  Finally, make sure that you have a few skintight rubber gloves on hand.  We had a girl who had a band-aid on her hand and we had to replace it thrice!

All the fun of decorating on a tray!

My efforts :-)