Growing little leaders

Simple night tonight, with lots of games – but with a simple twist: the girls had to lead the activities. Each one of the girls was in charge for a short activity, and I think that for the younger and quieter ones in particular, that it was a good chance to ‘be in charge’ for a while.

We started with a group chat about what a good leader needed (“Not to be a big mean bossy boots”) (yep, pretty accurate!), and we also spoke about using an authoritative voice and attitude. I had a bit of fun showing how it was pretty hard to listen to someone mumbling and twirling their hair and chewing their nails and scuffing their feet, and that you need instead to speak clearly, and project your voice, and stand up straight!

A couple of the activities we did included:

• getting your patrol ‘across the river’ using two pieces of paper (some intriguingly creative responses including throwing the papers back, and ripping them into multiple shoe sized bits)
• organising your patrol into tallest-shortest, oldest-youngest, time in guides – all in silence
• leading your patrol around the hall and out and around a pillar and back again – while they’re all blindfolded (moral of the game: don’t leave anyone behind!)
• tunnel ball and captain’s ball, again in silence (ish!)

And a few other games, including Not Fruit Salad, Shield Tiggy, and Secret Circle.

Overall, I think it was a pretty good evening – as AwesomeCoLeader said, it was probably a night which was more of a stretch for some of the younger and newer girls, rather than our old hands, but that’s okay every now and then.

We also had the re-worked Seniors patrols choose new patrol emblems – so we’ll be welcoming Dolphin and Bluebell patrols in place of Brumby and Blue Wren 🙂

After Guides, I helped out with the (only two!) Rangers – glad we didn’t cancel despite the sad turn up, as we had a bunch of fun trying to make a box oven (my first attempt!) – and it kind of worked… although next time, I think it will be worth investing in the heavy duty caterer’s foil, as we ended up catching the box on fire which was a bit dramatic!! Fun though 🙂

The Big Box Patrol Challenge!

New Patrols, new patrol names, new PLs and Seconds… what better way to make it mesh than giving them a bunch of cardboard boxes and saying “go for it”?!

To be fair, there was slightly more structure than that… kids all brought some cardboard boxes from home… and co-leader and I bought a couple of extras (woohoo, finally got rid of some moving boxes!) – so they had about 40 minutes to work together using only the boxes, scissors, and a roll of packing tape to make WHATEVER. We gave examples of creating a game, an obstacle course, making a doll house, a cubby, a robot, doing a play… anything they liked! The only catches were:
* They had to work as a patrol – all members of the patrol had to agree with what they were doing, no one was allowed to feel left out!
* They had to ‘present’ their work to the unit at the end of the 40 minutes – explain what they’d made and show it off.
* While they were building, they had to consider patrol emblems and agree (as a whole group!) on their preferences for new patrol names.

All in all – quite a success! Our new patrols seem to be working well (although we had a couple of girls away, so I guess we’ll see if the dynamic changes when everyone is there), we have agreed new patrol names (Blue Wren; Brumby; Kingfisher, Possum), and a cheap, interesting, good-for-the-earth (and the bank balance!) activity which let them use their creativity and really work in groups with limited adult “management” – true patrol time!

In other good news – two of our Ranger girls are going to try being Guide Helpers! We might have some assistants coming up!

Sunday takes us out for an adventure in the city – we’ve got 13 from my unit/s, 2 Rangers, and 2 to 4 from sister unit – will be quite a crowd!