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!