Brownies Lend a Hand and Give Back

Let's hear it for the three Rs! Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! Our Brownies were eager to share their knowledge of recycling with us today. Since Earth week is coming up we thought we would have an environment themed meeting to talk about how we can help the planet. This week we focused on 2 of the Rs - Reducing and Reusing.

We have our Brownie meeting at a local church and quite close by is an elementary school. As a way to help the planet we decided to take the girls to clean up the school yard and church grounds. They Loved this activity and worked super well in pairs and small teams to clean up 20 bags of garbage! They did so well!

There were some lovely conversations between girls and leaders as we cleaned up: 

"Why do people just throw garbage on the ground?"
"I know littering is wrong but there are big kids at my school who do it all the time. How can I get them to stop"
"Why is there so much garbage? We have garbage cans on the playground?!"


It was really interesting because many of the girls in our group go to the school where we did our clean up. They couldn't wait to go to school tomorrow and share what they did - reminding the other students to clean up after themselves on the playground.

After looking at the idea of Reducing - reducing the amount of garbage in our neighbourhood. We moved onto looking at the idea of Reusing. We talked about the concept of "New to You" and how there are lots of options for entertainment that aren't buying new things from the store. 



To our meeting the girls each brought in two books that they were finished reading. We put everything out on a table and the girls got to browse, read and ultimately pick one book to take home. All of the other books were packed up and donated to our local library. 


At the end of the meeting everyone went home with a new book and a smile on her face. The girls were happy about their new treasure but even more excited about donating their old books to the library for others to enjoy. We are really starting to see how good it feels to help others!

Grow Your Garden!

This week our Brownies are continuing to work on their Key to the Living World. After learning about water last week our girls have shifted their focus to plants and the process of growing. We are so lucky that our wonderful leader Snowy Owl has a background in Horticultural therapy and had some very innovative ways to teach the girls about plants. 

Instead of teaching the girls how to plant seeds, Snowy Owl taught them how to propagate plants. This is when you take cuttings of a plant and root them in new pots of soil. The plants then grow from the cutting making more and more plants. 

The girls learned all about different kinds of soils, the importance of water and sunlight and how best to take care of their very own plant. After everyone had a new plant buddy to take home we played a few games and worked on our Brownie memory books. What a wonderful meeting!

Water, Water Everywhere

We have just finished up with our Key to Active Living programming and are moving into our second last Key badge to earn of the year - The Key to the Living World. My girls have been super excited about this Key because it involves animals and learning lots of new things about the environment.

We have had a very strange Spring weather wise. Last week girls were running around in short sleeves and this week its snowing. Since we couldn't pass up the opportunity for fun in the snow we moved up out meeting about water and started outside by finding the hidden water outside. The girls looked at snow, icicles, our local creek and the semi-frozen mud on the baseball diamond. In addition to looking at sources of water the girls got to see some animal tracks and play some games in the snow. 

After some time outside we moved back indoor to do some water experiments with Snowy Owl and water colour paints with Brown  and Pink Owl. 

In this meeting we completed half of the requirements of the "Water, Water Everywhere" interest badge. I made up a page for the girls' interactive journal for them to complete the rest of the badge requirements at home if they wanted to. 

You can download the interest badge page here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7WJzZqx6Ug2bXNHTzlMSXVLdlU/view?usp=sharing

The girls had a great time learning about water. What kinds of activities does your unit do to learn about water?