Seasons Badge

At the moment we are working on our Seasons badge. We have done this before, but not with any of the current Brownies. Last time, we did Autumn - Kestrel made up a booklet and we had activities to work through. It went quite well but there was a bit too much reading for the younger girls, so this time we are doing things a bit differently.

Last week, each Six worked on a small booklet about a winter festival from a different culture. Each booklet had some information, a colouring page, a wordsearch or crossword and an activity. For Diwali, the activity was an acrostic poem with the word FIREWORKS. K was a difficult word to think of, Brown Owl and Kestrel couldn't think of anything but one of the Brownies from another six came up with Kaboom!! Perfect. The Rabbits were working on Chinese new year and their activity was to find out which sign of the zodiac everyone else was. We had lots of Horses, Brown Owl is an Ox and Kestrel is a Tiger. grrrrrrrr. They finished their booklet quickly so also made some paper lanterns. Lastly the Foxes were working on Kwanzaa and made a woven mat. When we were having a little presentation we found out that a lot of the Brownies had learnt a Swahili song in school so they sang it to us, it was beautiful :)

Next week we will be playing some fun games to do with staying safe in the dark. This time last year Edinburgh was knee-deep in snow and all of the Schools were closed. Luckily we haven't had any snow yet! It's very cold though. Brr.

Until next time,
FB

New Sixes

Tomorrow night at Brownies we are introducing new Sixes! If you've been following my blog you will know that we hardly had any Brownies for ages, then we got a bunch all at once. We had two sixes with a sixer each, but since our oldest Brownie moved to Guides in September, we've only had one sixer, and 2 sixes.
So, now everyone has made their promise and we all know each other a bit more, we are going to have 3 sixes!

 Foxes, Rabbits and Squirrels. The other Brownies who meet in the same place as us are the more traditional Kelpies, Pixies, etc, but we are animals! I would have liked a Mole or Badger six, but we already had these badges.

We're also re-starting INSPECTION. Every week at Brownies we have to make sure we have our hair tied back, have uniform on, wearing trainers or gym shoes, and have clean hands and nails.
Kestrel says that when she was a Brownie she had to bring a bum-bag every week with 7 things in it: 10p (to make an emergency phone call), a handkerchief (which can be used as a bandage), safety pin (many uses), notepad and pencil (to write important things down), a piece of string (for tying a gate shut?!) and an elastic band (many uses).  Even now Kestrel usually has a safety pin with her, and it comes in useful a lot! Recently it was used to pin a decoration on to someone's shirt when it fell off, the time before that a lady's handbag strap broke off and Kestrel was able to give her a safety pin to fix it to carry home! Amazing. The bum-bags weren't very cool though.

We're starting the Season's badge soon, that should be exciting - I'm off to look up how to stay safe in the dark. It gets dark very early here in Edinburgh in the winter.

Bye for now

FB

Happy Halloween

  

Dooking for Apples

Pumpkin Bowling

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGHHHH! 

Spooky Brownies and Merlin's little Rainbow!

"Best night at Brownies EVER"

FOOD NIGHT!

This week, we decorated biscuits and made cocktails, mmmmmmmm.

WE also played Port and Starboard, we haven't done that for ages, and our newest Brownie was enrolled - we now have 13 Brownies, all enrolled! This is great news because this time last year we only had 3 and were thinking about having to close the unit

That's all I have to say... Brownies are on October holidays for the next 2 weeks and when we get back it's Halloween :)

Rugby World Cup 2011

Hello!

This week  Brown Owl was away on holidays, so Kestrel and Merlin were in charge of us for the evening and we had the Rugby World Cup!

This year the World cup was hosted by New Zealand, so first we decorated some Koru pendants. (From the guiding magazine). We then stuck these onto some cardboard which Kestrel had cut into ovals, and made a hole in the top to make them into necklaces. Very nice :)

We then split into 3 teams for the competition - first each team were given their name (Italy, USA and South Africa) and we had to go to our correct flag. USA was easy but we weren't sure about Italy and South Africa at first...

We played a relay race where we had to throw balls backwards (because that's what they do in Rugby), and the 'Stop game'. This is one of my most favourite games - each Brownie is given 3 counters (we use old smartie lids). The Brownies run around, and a leader walks about the room. At some point, the leader puts her hand up in a 'stop' sign, but doesn't say anything, and the last person to stop loses a counter. After a few stops, the groups gather back and count how many counters they have left as a team. The team with the most left is the winner.

 We also played the spaceships game, where counters are spread across the room and as teams we have to collect as many counters as possible and bring them back to their circle (chalked on the floor), but we can only pick up one at a time!

Scoring is  a bit complicated in Rugby - you get points for winning, drawing, and extra points for all sorts of things.. Instead we made it simple by making 3 points for the team in first place, 2 for second and 1 for third.

In the end, South Africa and USA were joint second with 17 points but Italy were the winners with 21!

Denmark

Hello Friends!

Sorry for the lack of updates, but Kestrel doesn't have internet at home yet and she is the one who types up all these entries for me.

I've been visiting Europe recently... we had a lovely evening learning about Denmark from one of the Guides - she went there for a big Jambourette in the summer, and to raise money she was hosting theme nights and we each got a badge from it.

So we learnt about what Denmark is famous for  (Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote the Ugly Duckling and the Little Mermaid; Lego and Lurpak Butter). We looked up the country on our map and we can see it's not very far from Edinburgh really!

We also played a game and decorated some mermaids. It was great fun, and we all have a new badge and I have some mermaid friends :)

FB

We are BACK

Brownies are back!

This week we were mainly working on our handbooks - a lot of our girls enrolled at the end of last term so we have plenty of pages to work through. Everyone came back, except from our old Brownie who is moving up to Guides when they start back, but we recruited a new girl who moved from one of the other packs.

Other than handbooks we played a couple of games:
A game to learn people's names - we had to go round the circle and say our name and something we like, and remember everyone else's..
eg. "My name is Brown Owl and I like Cats"
"My name is Flat Brownie and I like chocolate, this is Brown Owl and she likes cats"
We all managed it, and it was surprising the girls who managed to remember lots without help from the rest of us!

We also played Johnny Went to the Zoo, which is a team game - each member of the team has a name like Johnny, Mummy, Daddy, Elephant, Giraffe, Monkey... and a leader tells a story about Johnny and his day at the zoo. Whenever your name is mentioned you have to run and the first person back to their team gets a point.

We have lots of fun things planned for this term, including learning more songs. Our current group of girls seem to enjoy singing more than others we've had recently so we need to dust off our song books and get learning some new ones. This site has loooads of songs if you're ever looking for any... I want to try Flea Fly Flo!

Look out for me from an exotic location next week....

Flat Brownie