With the coming of the new year, it means it's time to start planning winter and spring activities. Trying to add in enough variety to keep the girls (and Guiders!) interested can be a challenge.
How do I plan? Well, with the older girls I can only do a little bit of the planning without their input. For all my units, I start by setting up a table with the meeting dates and space for notes. Under each date I write a theme or title then list in brief the activities we're going to do or things that need to happen (i.e. forms that are due back). At the bottom I make a note of what program will be covered. I start off by slotting in activities with fixed dates (i.e. Thinking Day, March Break, Cookie Day) and then work from there.
For Guides, we have a couple of outings in the planning stages that should shake things up a bit. Usually we wait for the spring to get back outside, but this year we're hoping to have a winter outdoors night. We have snow at the moment and hopefully it isn't the last of the season! We'll work on some badges - Body Works and Reporting are planned so far, and try to get the girls into running more activities. One other thing we're going to try is a progressive badge where we do one activity each week and then put all the results into a memory booklet at the end. I'm not sure how well this will work, but I think it will be fun to try, and give the girls something to do as they are arriving.
With Pathfinders, we will be spending the first meeting planning out our meetings until March Break. We also need to talk about what the girls want to do at Winter Camp at the end of February. Our big project for January and February will be planning and preparing for Thinking Day. As we have so many new Pathfinders, we need to spend more time on getting things organized then we have in the past. We want everything to go as smoothly as possible.
Because of exams at the end of January, the Rangers will probably only have one or two meetings this month. Our first meeting back will be the cancelled meeting from December, where we were going to explore summer jobs and applications. I've already seen some postings for student summer jobs, so this will be a timely meeting.
