Back for our final term for the year, and we decided to quickly squeeze in some promise and law activities. Not sure about other peoples’ units, but certainly we struggle to balance the ‘serious’ side of guiding with the fun, so this was a rare night focused entirely on promise and law!
Our Junior girls did three activities – the first was just a bit of a chat – going through the promise line by line, and asking for examples of how they could live up to the promise. The first bit “I promise that I will do my best” we asked each of the girls to have a think and then give an example of when they’ve done their best in the last week. They were all able to give an example, and it was really nice to give them all a chance to shine a little bit and be a bit proud of how they’d done their best – at school to get an A in maths, in carefully doing a picture for their auntie, in helping out at home.
Next we had a game which involved the girls all having a word or two of the promise written on a post-it note, and stuck on their backs. They had to work together to get it in the correct order… and once they’d figured that, we mixed it up and had them try again, but this time without speaking! I think the ‘without speaking’ part was probably a bit too tough for the younger group, but they got there eventually, with the odd suggestion or two from the leaders.
The post-it-note promises
Finally, they made teeny-tiny mini promise books – they ended up being about 2cms wide by 3cms tall! The girls really liked them though, and I got shown several different ones for approval 🙂
Meanwhile, the Senior girls (who we’ve decided to split into four smaller patrols, rather than 3 too-large patrols) did two activities – making promise origami ‘chatterboxes’, which they all found fun (lots of comments of “ohhhhh I haven’t done this in years!!) (they’re so old our big girls, heh).
The second activity was run by one of our new leaders, putting into practice an idea she got from a recent training weekend – getting the girls to do a kind of graffiti wall about what they believe in, as part of the ‘develop my beliefs’ part of the promise.
Some of their comments were lovely: “keep calm and live life”, “world peace is a possibility”, “everyone is equal no matter what colour skin they have”, “your imagination is the limit”… and some were a bit less sensible: “I believe in flying pigs!”. Heh. Still, they seemed to have fun, and the majority of the comments were good!
Overall, a good night, and one where promise and law activities thankfully did not end up boring!
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