The Awesomeness of Resuable Dishes!

Just a short post to talk about my newfound love of reusable dishes - primarily my IKEA plates/cups/bowls & cutlery. 

We have at least 3 potluck/celebrations a year - Enrollment, Halloween Party and Advancement. Every year I disposable plates and every year the plates are huge, the girls eat so much junk and there is so much waste. My guider friend Cathy has had the same set of IKEA plates for her guide unit for years and I asked her reasoning behind it - mainly is it worth all of the washing? I came to the conclusion that for the cost of disposable plates for 3 events I could get 30 plates/cups/bowls & cutlery which would serve us for years. They are a good size for kids (not gigantic), don't fold under the weight of food, don't get knocked over as easily and most importantly we are helping the environment by not throwing out one use dishes. 

So now after each event my dishwasher is a sea of rainbow plastic. Its really not that hard to take home a plastic bag of dirty plates and they store quite nicely in my basement. 

I'm glad we've switched over to reusable and I'm hoping I can encourage some other units to give it a try as well!

SWAPS!

I'm a guider who loves to craft. I love crafting tiny little things at meetings and camp to add to hats and backpacks. Making and trading crafts is a big thing in our guiding circles. Any little thing you can make and trade is called a SWAPS (Small, Watch-a-ma-call-it, Affectionally, Pinned, Somewhere). 

Every year we teach the girls about this guiding tradition and they are so eager to make things to trade with their friends and girls in other groups. A few big thing we stress with SWAPS are:

1. You never say no to a trade - everyone has different crafting skills but we want everyone to be included. We trade with everybody - sparks through to rangers.
2. Always use your manners
3. Make LOTS! Its heartbreaking for girls to get to an event and see everyone is Swapping and they have nothing to trade. If you make lots giving a handfuls of traders to a friend is no big deal and then everyone can participate. 

We've always had an amazing time with SWAPS. Do you do them in your Unit?

Birthdays Around the World

Over the summer we received several packages of badges and challenges from our UK Pen Pals. Over the course of the year our leadership team did their best to combine our Canadian Girl Guide programming with the badges from abroad so the girls could complete everything and have a ton of fun in the process. Over this one meeting we completed parts of the:

- Key to Active Living

- Key to my Community

- BC Colour Me Healthy

- Brownie Interest Badge: Your Day

- UK Birthday Badge

We started off the meeting by looking at healthy and non-healthy foods. The girls created healthy and unhealthy meals using various cards and then we turned it into a game. While wearing oven mitts and carrying the cards on wooden spoons, the girls had to gather their food cards one at a time and recreate their meals on the table on the other side of the room. They had to do this relay race style, rotating so everyone got a turn. 

This was HILARIOUS. The girls loved it and had so much fun! the oven mitts really make it a challenge!

After we talked about healthy and non-healthy food we talked about different celebrations and what each of the girl's traditionally do to celebrate their birthdays. Lots of things were similar - they have a party, open presents, have cake. We talked about how they thought kids in other parts of the world might celebrate too. In the UK, in China, etc. We have girls from many diverse backgrounds so it was really neat to hear about some of the traditions they knew. 

We then explored some tasty birthday treats from Austrailia. We learned about the special birthday treat "fairy bread" which I thought was very appropriate for Brownies. Essentially Fairy Bread is white bread covered in butter or icing and then dipped in tiny rainbow sprinkles. Obviously my children went nuts over this. 

We decided to do a fairy bread taste test. Each girl got a piece of bread which we cut into 4. One at a time we tried out butter, vanilla icing, chocolate icing and cream cheese icing along with lots and lots of sprinkles. They had the best time and many said that they would love to go live in Australia if this is what they can look forward too on their birthday. 

Have you ever done a Birthday Meeting? What kinds of things did you do to celebrate?

Winter Holiday Party!

Every year we finish up our Brownies meetings for the year around the second week of December. The winter season is so, so busy with family events, school concerts and preparing for a variety of holiday celebrations. 

Last year we tried something different. Instead of having a party just for the girls we decided to have a parent/child event where our families could come in and see just what Brownies is all about. We also took this oppertunity to rifle through the craft cupboard and see what we could make and do for limited purchasing. We've been talking to the girls about the importance of buying only what we need, but more importantly using what we already have. 

We started off the meeting with our opening song. The girls loved sharing with their parents everything they had learned so far about their opening, fairy song and circles. After that we split into patrols and had everyone start at one of three different stations. 

This year we had several stations for the girl's and their parents to enjoy. The first was making some sweet treats - snow-flower cupcakes. This awesome idea was shared with me by my guider friend Nikki. If you cut marshmallows diagonally and stick the stick side in coloured sprinkle-sugar you are able to create a marshmallow petal. If you slowly work these around the edge of a frosted cupcake in circles you get rows and rows of petals which eventually look like a marshmallow flowers. We specifically used blue, white, purple and pink sugar to give the cupcakes a winter/frozen feel to them. 

The second station that was set up was building winter houses. I was gifted these amazing winter felt kits from another guider last summer (Thanks Michelle Gilcrest!) and I knew we just ahd to use them at the holiday party. My girls LOVE using the glue guns so I know it was going to be a hit.


The last station was where the girls created fleece winter hats and scarves to donate to our local women's shelter. A HUGE thanks to snowy owl who prepped all of these in advance so the girls could easily cut, tie and put together without doing too much sewing. In the end of an hour the girls created 15 hats and 20 scarves to donate. I took them over to the shelter later that week and in January we received a lovely letter thanking the unit for their efforts. The hats and scarves were given out around the Christmas holiday and all were well received. 

We finished off the party with a few songs and our group closing. What a wonderful way to finish off the fall guiding term. 

UK Pen Pals

Last year our group decided to complete the Brownie Pen Pals interest badge. Since I'm a member of a few UK Girl Guiding Facebook pages I thought it would be great to find some pen pals to do a swap. In no time at all we had three units lined up for a swap. My unit made crafts, sent pictures and badges - they were really excited. 

Unfortunately, weeks then months passed and we heard nothing back from our pen pals. I tried to contact these units on Facebook and although they confirmed that they had received our packages they never ended up sending things back to us. My girls were really disappointed and I was frustrated as well. 

In the summer I posted the story onto one of these Facebook pages to see if there was any other way to contact these groups. I was then overwhelmed by the response of people who wanted to send us something to make up for these other units. 

We ended up receiving letters and parcels from 8 different groups containing all sorts of things from letters and photos of their groups to guiding teddy bears and UK badges for our girls to earn. I was simply overwhelmed by these guiders generosity. 

Since there was so much sent to us (8 groups after all) we split up the goodies between the girls from last year and our current group. Our current girls wrote back to these new pen pals and will be doing some of the challenge badges that they sent us. Our girls from last year got a lovely package of badges in the mail from the groups that wrote back. 

I'm so glad to know that the guiding sisterhood extends near, far and overseas and that we truly have friends where ever we go. A HUGE thank you to the UK Girl Guide groups that wrote back to us. We are so thankful that this story had a happy ending. 

Key to I Can - Cooking and Tool Skills

We're heading into December now and working to finish up our program area - Key to I Can. The girls have been super eager to try their hand at cooking and some wanted to work with tools so we thought we'd do a meeting that incorporated both. 

We decided that alongside the Key to I can we wanted to do the "Mouse around the House" challenge from Alberta. This challenge focuses on basic home skills, things like setting a table, cooking and woodworking - very "traditional" brownie skills. 

For this meeting Tanwy Owl took over the "tinkering" section of programming. She went over all sort of different tools with the girls and talked about their uses. Then using our fancy colour-changing unicorn night lights from camp she showed the girls how to change batteries using a screwdriver to remove the base plates. Also, bring the crafty leader that she is Tawny Owl taught the girls about different kinds of simple circuits taking apart and putting back together the night lights entirely. 

While half of the girls worked with tools, I did pizza and s'mores making with the other group.  The girls loved learning how to use the can opener and cut up all of the toppings for their pizza. Leader Tip: Before you put your girl's pizzas in the over have them take a picture with their creation. Then you can (hopefully) match up the pizza with its owner when it's finished cooking. 

After the pizza was done it was time to set the table. The 2nd year girls learned how to do this last year when we completed the "Girl Guides Gateway to our Past" challenge so happily took the lead to show the younger girls what to do. Once the table was set it was time to eat. 

The Girls Loved this meeting and were so happy to go home with some new badges for their sash and camp blanket. 

Brownies Enrollment - 2017

One of my favourite events in the fall is our annual Enrolment ceremony. Its so exciting to see the girls work so hard to learn everything Brownie. They take a lot of pride in their uniforms and sashes, knowing their Promise, Motto & Law and being a part of a fairy circle. 

This year we did a lot of work to prepare for the Enrolment Ceremony. The girls created lanterns for decorations and we created a whole introduction/setting up of the toadstool for the second year girls to get more involved. 

We were all ready to invite parents into our meeting space for the ceremony when there was a big issue. The church had double booked our space by accident and it appeared that the other group couldn't be moved into another space. The girls were a little worried about the ceremony and what was going to happen next but we assured them that Brownies are flexible and we would still have a great time. 

Cue the move across the hall to the church's storage room. Big enough for a very cozy Enrolment, our girls moved over and set up all of our props and chairs for our ceremony. In about 10 minutes things were back to normal and after a quick run through we were ready for family and friends. 

The girls did a wonderful job and were so proud of themselves. So happy to be a leader with this amazing group!