Tour of the Girl Guide Archives

This week our girls had a special opportunity to visit the Girl Guides of Ontario Archives. Our regular meeting space is down the street from the Archives so with a quick phone call to the Archivist Katey and a little bit of planning we were able to set up the event for the girls.

We met at the Ontario Council location and met our three wonderful volunteers who were to be our tour guides. They joined us for our Brownie Opening and then we split our group in half, one group toured the archives first and the other worked on activities from the heritage box. after 45min we switched. 

My group went to the archives first. The girls had never been to the Ontario Council office before and were very impressed with the colourful, kid friendly space.

The first thing our volunteers showed the girls were pictures of lord and lady Baden Powell. I was very impressed that the girls remembered all about who these important people are and how the whole guiding movement began. 

After learning about the Baden Powells the Brownies were shown various vintage uniforms. They were really impressed with the white and blue Rosebud dresses and really liked the brown dress uniform with the Brownie dues pouch and Beret. Many of them wondered why we don't still wear dresses. 

After looking at uniforms though the ages we went to look at some of the old print publications. The girls learned about the history of cookie selling and looked at cookie boxes from the last 100 years!

As a special treat the girls got to learn about the Sea Rangers. They even had some hats for us to try on!

Have you heard of Aggie? In the Willow Bluffs district an Aggie (Spring Festival) was held every year for its senior branches. A great feature of this event was a life-sized doll (named Aggie after Agnes Baden Powell) that was brought to each festival dressed in that year's theme (space, aloha, etc). The girls fell in love with the Aggie Doll and got some great photos with her. 

After my group had finished in the Archives we moved to the main meeting space and got to do some activities from our Provincial heritage boxes. The girls got to learn all about the old Brownie Interest badges by playing BINGO, played bean bag games and played a memory game that featured all sort of historical girl guide events. 

Once both groups were back together Breanna shared about her week with our Brownie Dolls and sand our closing song. 

What a great meeting at the Archives!

Sparks Prep for International Night and Explore Some Guiding History

Thinking day is coming up soon and we are getting ready for some fun and exciting times. Every year our sparks unit gets together with 5 other units (various sparks - pathfinder groups) and run an international night. Every group picks a country and puts together a display with hat crafts, food and badges to sell. Each girl comes with a bad of change and we sell each of these items for about a quarter a piece. At the end all of the money is donated to the Canadian World Friendship Fund!

This year we chose the United Kingdom as our country for international night booth. The girls were very excited as they know a lot about the UK from being Pen Pals with the Binfield Rainbows Group. Together our Sparks group put together 30 crown jewel swaps to sell at the upcoming international night. 

In addition to making the swaps we thought it would be fun to talk about some girl guide history. Jellybean has a collection of vintage Brownie and Girl Guide uniforms that she brought with her to the meeting. With the help of my volunteer Spark Emmeline we learned about the different parts of the old Brownie uniform. After that we laid out various pieces and let the girls play dress up. They had a blast!

Pottery Studio Trip

This year we tried a new system of picking our program. In my unit we try to be as girl-focused as possible and do badges and challenges that our kids want to do. At our first camp we did a sticker vote to help decide on the interest badges we would do as a group. Overwhelmingly the girls wanted to complete the "Artist at Work" interest badge. 

This badge involves taking the girls to an art studio and watching how an artist works. In addition it asks you to try different types of art. We have already tried out more craft based projects so we thought it would be really fun to take the girls to a pottery studio.


We chose to take the kids to a paint your own pottery studio called Colour Me Mine. Each girl got to choose between a plate, bowl or cup to paint. Our local artist showed the girls how you needed to paint a minimum of three layers of each colour for it to really show through. We also talked about colour gradients and how the more layers of paint were added to the piece the deeper the colour. 

As the girls painted they chatted about their work often comparing designs and asking for help to recreate others ideas that they were admiring. As girls finished we formed small groups and our artist host took us to the back room to show us the kilns.

The girls learned about how hot the kilns get and how it takes over 18 hours to fire the pottery. They also discoverd that before the pieces go in the kiln they have to be coated in a blue top glaze. Don't worry the glaze when baked becomes clear so all of their wonderful paintings will shine through. 

We had an amazing time at the pottery studio and can't wait to see our pottery when its all fired and ready for pick up next week! Have you ever tried a trip like this with your unit?

Marvelous Masks

This week the girls worked on a section of the Key to the Arts called Marvelous masks. We talked a little bit about the history of masks and how they were used on stage and in celebrations like Marti Gras. 

The girls learned about the primary and secondary colours and since we were going to be using diffusion paper in making their masks we talked about colour mixing and which colours look good paired with others. 

The girls used water colour paints to add colour to the diffusion paper mask elements. The masks and diffusion paper came out of a kit which really allowed the girls the flexibility to try mixing and matching the mask pieces they liked.

Once the pieces were painted and dried the girls assembled their masks. They all turned out great!

After the masks were made we played a little bit of charades. This was a badge testing night so girls who still needed to be tested were able to pop in and out of these activities as needed. Super fun night!