Happy Holidays!

Tonight was our final meeting of 2016 and we celebrated with a holiday party. The hall was decorated for Christmas, we had carols playing, and some of the girls even dressed up in holiday-themed attire or pyjamas.

Our first activity was decorating homemade gingerbread.We provided white icing and lots of toppings - then let the girls decorate to their hearts content!

Everyone then had an opportunity to work on three different crafts - some girls did them all, while others spent the entire evening on a single item. We had fimo ornaments, shink art pictures, and a 'free crafting' table for the girls to explore their creativity.

At the end of the night, everyone received crests and challenge crests, as well as a special Christmas crest. We closed with reminders that tonight was our last meeting of 2016 and Taps.

International Human Rights Day

Tonight we celebrated International Human Rights Day. This is the 3rd GGC Make a Difference Day for 2016-2017.

International Human Rights Day is celebrated every year on December 10th, commemorating the day in 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations. This declaration was created to help all people achieve dignity, freedom and equality. In honour of this special day, Girl Guides of Canada produced an Instant Meeting to encourage units to take part in activities to learn more about human rights. We chose to use activities from the Instant Meeting and from Right Now!, a resource from Girlguiding UK (2007).

Download the GGC Instant Meeting

As the girls arrived, they played a tag game, after which we held our usual opening ceremony and played an active game.



We started out by discussing what human rights are and shared the following explanation:

"Human rights are basic, fundamental rights that belong to everyone. They are freedoms, opportunities, and ways of treating one another that all human beings deserve." (GGC Instant Meeting)

Our first activity was called Picture Your World (Right Now!, page 26). The girls were divided into 3 groups and given supplies to draw a picture of something that is important to them. Here's the catch: the groups were uneven and not given equal supplies. The girls could only use the supplies provided and could not visit or speak to the other groups - they could, however, observe.

• Group 1: 2 girls, 1 sheet of paper per girl, a pencil with an eraser for each girl, a full set of sharpened pencil crayons. 
• Group 2: 4 girls, 2 sheets of paper, 2 pencils without erasers, a handful of pencil crayons, some unsharpened and not covering every colour.
• Group 3: 7 girls, 1 sheet of scrap paper, one pencil without an eraser, a handful of pencil crayons and markers - most unsharpened or not working.

After a few minutes we brought everyone back together so they could all see the supplies and results for each group. We talked about how they felt during the activity: How did they feel when they saw groups with better/worse materials? Was there time for everyone in the large group to have a turn? Did the better equipped groups want to share their materials even through they weren't allowed to? Was it fair? How do you think this activity might reflect the reality of life around the world?

The next activity was Gagged! (Right Now!, page 141). Each girl drew a slip of paper with a '1' or a '2' on it. The girls with a 2 on their paper were not allowed to speak or make themselves heard during the following discussion. We then talked about food storage and water purification as another clause towards the Outdoor Cooking badge that we started at camp. Once we finished, we discussed how the people who couldn't speak felt to be unheard, how they reacted when they wanted to respond to a question or what someone else had said, and how those who could speak felt about having a voice when others did not. We then moved the discussion onto groups or individuals who are unable to make themselves heard and who looks after their rights. (Ideas about groups that might not have a voice included people living in poverty, the position of a particular group within a larger society, being a girl or woman, having no voice - such as animals or the environment.)

We then had a break for an active game - Ladders, followed by Everybody's It Tag.

Afterwards, we started an activity called Right Old Journey (Right Now!, page 10). Each Patrol received a sheet of paper with 20 rights, based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. They then had to discuss and come to agreements on which rights they felt were the least important until they were left with only one right. As a group, we discussed the right that each group had kept - Peace, Safety, Health Care, and Education. We also talked about which rights they gave up first, and what it might be like to actually live without them.

Food, Own Culture, Money, Clothes

Transport, Shelter, Peace, Water

Safety, Religion, Education, Privacy

Play/Leisure, Health Care, Family, An Opinion

The final activity of the evening was Guide Rights (GGC Instant Meeting). As a group, we came up with a list of Rights that we have as members of our Unit. 

The meeting ended with a sing-song, announcements and reminders for next week, and Taps.

December Camp 2016

On December 2nd, the Guides, Pathfinders and Rangers headed to Camp Teka in Paris for a weekend camp. We were joined by two Guiders and one Guide from the 1st New Dundee Guides, making our total numbers 11 Guides, 1 Pathfinder, 1 Ranger, and 4 Guiders. Our program was very relaxed, but we still managed to work on the Alberta Camp Challenge - Fall Segment, Camp-Out Emblem, Explore the Outdoors and Nature and the Outdoor Cooking Badge.

Once all the girls had arrived on Friday night, we sat down to decorate Warm Fuzzy bags. These are paper bags that the girls put their name on (and decorate) and leave on a table for the weekend. The challenge is for each girl to put something nice - a "warm fuzzy" - into the bag of every other girl over the course of the weekend. The bags also make a handy place to store drawings, activity sheets, friendship bracelets, crafts, etc. We reviewed the rules for the weekend, discussed how to stay safe at camp, why we do head counts, and what to do in the event of a fire. Snack was bagel cheese pizzas with veggies and dip. Afterwards, the girls spent the rest of the evening playing card games, drawing and colouring, and talking.

Saturday morning started late due to a late night beforehand, and we started the day off with a breakfast of waffles, fruit, scrambled eggs, blueberry muffins and yogurt. After breakfast, the girls tackled their camp chores - washing dishes, sweeping floors, wiping tables, replacing toilet paper rolls, etc, and then we were ready to move on to our program. We started the morning off with a craft - clothespin candle holders. We made ours with small round cardboard boxes from Michaels, clothespins, battery operated tealights and paint. They turned out very well - and apparently double as hats...

The remainder of the morning was spent building a massive chair and blanket fort in the middle of the room.

Before lunch, our Ranger and one Guider showed the girls how to make a box oven and how one works. They removed all of the old tinfoil and duct tape from the box and rebuilt it ready to use to make brownies!

Lunch involved outdoor cooking. The girls were sent off to find tinder, kindling and wood for our fire, practiced separating the wood (although it was a rather scattered woodpile...), lit the fire and kept it burning. They also learned how to operate and light a camp stove, which we used to cook Chicken Noodle Soup. Once the fire was burning well, everyone cooked hot dogs, and once it burnt down, we were able to toast marshmallows and make S'mores! After we finished eating, the box oven was set up to bake the brownies for after supper. We all cleaned up the cooking supplies, washed dishes, and went back inside for quiet time. The fort building continued, along with colouring, drawing, card games, and working on challenges. Later in the afternoon, our Ranger and one Guider took the majority of the girls on a hike before supper.

Supper was the ever-popular taco salad (tortilla chips, meat, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, salsa and sour cream). The evening was spent with more activities chosen by the girls, and also an enrolment ceremony. We enrolled both our Pathfinder and Ranger into their respective branches by candlelight.

We had our "Worms and Dirt" (Brownies, chocolate pudding and gummy worms) as a nighttime snack, about 10pm, before getting ready for bed. Although we had bedding out and pyjamas on, it was closer to midnight before we actually went to bed!

Sunday morning was busy, with packing and cleaning. We had leftovers, fruit, chocolate chip muffin cake and toast for breakfast (who would have thought tacos for breakfast would be so popular?) Our Ranger and one Guider did camp evaluation while the other Guiders worked on checking off the cleaning tasks on the list so that we would all be ready to leave once all the girls had been picked up.