In honour of Giving Tuesday, we spend the evening assembling and making gifts for others.
We began with our usual opening ceremony, followed by an active game.
Our main activity for the evening was creating and decorating a Card, Gift Bag, Canvas Tile Magnet and Bath Salt Ball to give to someone special in their lives. While many of the cards had a Christmas theme, the gift bags were move eclectic! The canvas tiles were painted with a variety of designs and colours and plastic ornament balls decorated ready to hold the bath salts. The bath salt receipe we used was vary simple, using equal amounts of fine sea salt and Epsom salts (4 cups of each made enough to fill 13 ornament balls with a bit left over).
Our service project over the past month was collecting items for The Shoeboxes for Shelters Project. This program collects shoeboxes filled with high quality items as gifts for women in shelters. Boxes are collected and distributed locally and each is intended to have a value of approximately $50. We were able to collect enough items to fill 3 Shoeboxes and are very excited that our boxes will be going to young women aged 15 to 18 living in transitional housing in Brantford.
We ended our meeting with reminders about our sleepover on Friday and visit to the Food Bank next week, then closed with Taps.
Tonight we explored our creativity with the help of one of our Guiders who studied Fine Arts.
We began with our usual opening ceremony and an active game, then moved right into our activities for the evening.
We started our with Still Life Drawing and Perspective Drawing using a display of teddy bears and flowers. These were challenging activities for the Guides, and also something most hadn't tried before. The next activity was from the Girls First platform called "Draw, Don't Stop" where the girls created drawings without lifting their pencils from the paper.
Our next activity was Clay Pictionary. We made the easy clay recipe on the Girls First platform (mix 1 cup flour, 3/4 cup salt and 3 oz hot water together and knead into a dough-y clay). Each Patrol had a glob of clay, a plate to make their pictures and a set of cards. As they played, the Guides discovered it's much harder to work with clay rather than markers in this game!
We ended the evening with time for free drawing and sculpting, resulting in some really neat creations.
After cleaning up, we ended with reminders for next week and closed with Taps.
This week we didn't have access to our regular meeting space, so we headed out to a local park for some outdoor fun!
The Pathfinders and Rangers had planned the evening and led us in a Glowstick Scavenger Hunt, Glowstick Tag, Sardines, and Flashlight Tag. Before heading back to the church for pick-up, we had some time to play on the swings, teeter-totters, slide and play structure. Everyone had a great time - and running around helped us all stay warm!
This week we dabbled in the My Mighty Mind theme by talking a bit about stress and positive ways of handling it, including being creative, mindfulness and yoga.
As everyone arrived, the Patrols marked attendance and collected dues. We had our regular opening with horseshoe formation and then played an active game.
Our first activity was a Discussion About Stress. We used the information that GGC put out for National Mental Health Week in 2016 (see link at the bottom). The girls who wished to had an opportunity to share about times they have felt stressed, how it made them feel and what they did to work through it.
We then moved on to creativity as a way of handling stress by Painting Tiles. We had gotten cheap tiles form the Habitat Reuse Store and provided paints and brushes so that the girls could create their own designs and/or messages.
After cleaning up from painting, we did a mindfulness exercise using the Chocolate Meditation using peanut-free mini Aero bars. The script is in the GGC National Mental Health Week 2016 package (see link below). This was a lot of fun, as well as being tasty!
Our final activity was Yoga, again using some of the suggestions from the GGC National Mental Health Week 2016 package (see link below). We have a fairly large meeting space, so everyone was able to spread out and have their own area.
We closed with reminders for next week (Outdoors Night) and Taps.
Links:
