Artist Badge

Three new Brownies last week!! We sent some postcards around the local schools to try and get some more. There will hopefully be another showing up next week too :)

Lately we've been working on the Artist badge
 We made Easter cards before the Easter hols, and coloured mandalas with only three colours (nice link to a page with lots of printable sheets here) and made a picture of our own choice.

Last week at our meeting we finished off our activities.
First, we split everone up into red, blue or yellow team. We don't have even sixes at the moment but there were 12 girls so we just mixed everyone up. Then we played Gypsy wants (Colour Version) I tried to find an online link to this game but it must be called something different, so I'll create a new post with both!

We then spent most of the rest of the meeting making collages of ourselves. We stuck with the colours we were given at the start of the meeting, so were only allowed to use that colour, black or white. Kestrel, Merlin and Brown owl were then mixed colours!

I especially like the hair of the one on the bottom right!! This worked out really well as an activity -  each colour at their own table so they couldn't try to use EVERYTHING in our craft box. Ended up with some really creative pictures to cover our notice board :)

Postcard Display

Here are most of our postcards from the exchange! We had a few more which didn't fit onto the map, and more strings, but Kestrel forgot to take a picture of the full display before taking it off the wall at the last meeting.

We printed the map from National Geographic's Education site. They have some tools to make massive poster maps, but what we did was make a '1 page printable map', saved it as pdf, then printed it using the 'poster' option of Adobe Reader, Scaling it up 250% so that it fit on 2 rows of 4 A4 portrait sheets. This was a good size for us!

We had a lovely time participating in the exchange, we all got to try out our reading skills (some of the place and people's names were difficult!) and see some lovely postcards from other units around the world :)

Gypsy Wants

Gypsy Wants

minimum 2 teams of 3.
Equipment needed - some way to keep score (we give out counters), list of objects

Split into even teams and number each member.

A leader at the other end of the hall sits on a chair with a list of objects. She then calls a person and object. Eg. "Gypsy wants number 2 to bring her a hat". The first member down to Gypsy gets a point. The team with the most points at the end wins!

A list of things:
A pen/pencil
A watch (usually has to ask a leader for this)
A Brownie Sash/Handboook
A girl with... earrings, aged 7/8/9/10, with long hair, with a brother, blue eyes etc.
A shoe/sock (depending how we feel, we specify the sock has to be off the foot!)
The colour of Brown Owl's car
A jacket/scarf/hat
"Lucky" (one of our soft toy mascots)
Their whole six (holding hands to get the point)

I really advise having a list, it's hard to think of things on the spot!
 
If you know this game under another name, please let me know.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Gypsy wants (colour version)

Teams of 3 (can be adjusted depending on numbers)
in each team, have red, blue and yellow. It is useful to have stickers so Gypsy can check they're not cheating.

This time tell the teams that Gypsy is going to call out an item, and the person who is the same colour as that item has to run down. Same as above, first to Gypsy gets a point.
eg. if  'grass' was called, the green member would have to run down.
This opens up possibilities for mixing colours, as 2 team members have to run for green, orange and purple. And Brown was the last!

A list of things:
sky, sea, blueberries, blue bird, jeans, Brown Owl's car, strawberries, cherries, post box, lips, tomatoes, lemon, giraffe (actually there was some discussion about the colour of a giraffe), banana, butter, custard, sun, cheese, orange, fire (accepted r, y, or), pumpkin, cheese, fanta, tigers, nemo, green, grass, broccoli, crocodile, celery, lime, frog, purple, blackcurrants, plum, grapes, lavender

You could also have teams of 6 with each a different colour, or black and white. If you try this please let me know how it goes!

Police Visit

Brown Owl arranged with the local police station that we went for a visit! The community officer doesn't normally work at the time we have Brownies, so thank you to him for rearranging for us :)

We had a tour of the station, got locked in the cells, learnt about interview rooms (and the big red panic button), tried on the heavy, heavy uniform and had a go in the police van! Both Kestrel and Merlin took some pictures, so here's a selection...

did you know the toilet only flushes from the outside?

these 2 asked about 40 questions each during the hour we were there!

this is everyone except Merlin

All of the equipment is heavy

usually only one person is in the back there, but we can take 6 Brownies away at once!

Quick activity

I'm not sure where on the internets I read this activity, but thank you whoever it was!

Kestrel is part of the Edinburgh county team for Together 2012 - a camp for Brownies and Guides aged 8-12. This camp is going to be a lot of fun, it's 2 nights indoors and 2 outdoors, we will get to meet Brownies and Guides from all over Scotland and get to visit Netherud.

6 Brownies and 6 Guides from across Edinburgh are getting to go, but most of them don't know us, or each other, so we had a get-to-know-you/information evening a few weeks ago. Everyone was squashed in a little room with all of the parents, coffee, tea and juice, name badges, a chocolate fountain which didn't work (Kestrel was in charge of that, oops) and 3 of the 4 Edinburgh leaders who are going on the camp!

It was lovely meeting everyone and the parents, let's hope they are all still happy about going! The meeting was only for an hour, but there was a little ice-breaker activity for the girls: a marshmallow tower building competition!

There are suggestions on the internet to do this with marshmallows and spaghetti, but this version used cocktail sticks. There were about 10 marshmallows and 20 cocktail sticks per group and they had about 10 minutes to make the tallest tower which stood up by itself!

One of the groups had an interesting technique of breakign up the marshmallows and having some sort of sticky goo tower, it came second inn the end (just!). It's more difficult than itt looks!

here is the winner

 

PS the chocolate fountain wasn't a total disaster, it turned into a chocolate fondue instead!

World Guiding - International Camp

As part of our World Guiding badge, we had to

Talk with someone who has been abroad with Girlguiding UK

Our ex-young leader (now a Leader with Guides) went on an International camp to Hong Kong during the Christmas holidays, and she kindly agreed to come along and chat with us about it, and she brought loads of things to show us!

The postcard below is actually from Vietnam, it's one of our exchange swaps, we were talking about them at the same time :) We actually had a Hong Kong exchange, so we were able to see on the map (I'll post that some other time) where it was in the world!

Cool camp blanket! International camping sounds like a lot of fun, but they tried lots of strange food, not sure I could manage that. We each got given one of the tartan friendship pins, since there were some left over.

It was great having someone different to chat to during the meeting, and the Brownies all had lots of interesting questions and comments. Thank you!!

Odd Post

Merlin just sent me a bunch of photos, so here's a good one from the Christmas party! More posts to come soon :)