Our final regular meeting of the year was our annual Messy Night! This is a night where everyone gets wet and messy with paint, shaving cream, water and anything else we happen to include!
The way Messy Night works is we provide a variety of activities, and the Guides, Pathfinders and Rangers choose which ones they want to try. The main rule of the evening is that you cannot get someone else wet/messy without their consent - meaning those who want to stay dry are able to do so.
As it was somewhat cooler this May than in past years, we were unable to do some of our favourite activities, such as Paint Twister and the Paint-Water-Shaving Cream Slip 'n' Slide. This year's activities included:
- Shaving Cream Marbling
- Face Painting
- Sidewalk Chalk
- Hair Chalk
- Shave the Balloon
- Bubbles
- "Pie" Eating (Whipped Cream)
- Finger Painting
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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 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.
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This week was our annual Messy Night, the highlight of the year for many of our girls! We started the evening off as usual, covered some basic rules for activities, and headed outside for some messy fun. Prior to this meeting, parents are sent an email explaining the types of activities we have planned and suggesting that girls wear old clothing, bathing suits, and/or clothes that can get wet and dirty, along with crocs or sandals that can get wet. Parents are also told that we do not have shower/bathing facilities available, but all supplies are washable. As many of the girls go home in various shades of dried paint, this is an important notice!
Messy Twister
Messy Twister requires a tarp, shaving cream and washable paint. Shaving cream is squirted onto the tarp to form the circles and paint applied to make rows of red, green, yellow and blue. Play as regular Twister! Fun Fact: The smell of shaving cream will stay on the tarp no matter how many times you try to clean it!
Shave the Balloon
In order to shave balloons, girls work in pairs. They inflate a balloon, cover it in shaving cream and then use a razor or knife to remove the shaving cream. Sometimes this is done successfully, while other times the balloon bursts! Be sure to pick up all scraps of balloons when you're finished.
Spray Painting
For this activity we mixed washable paint and water in spray bottles and spread out a tarp on the ground. Girls used the spray bottles to create designs on card stock ... and later on each other...
Water Fights
As a filler activity, we provided a bucket of water, lots of water pistols and water balls for the girls to play with. Some girls have better aim than others...
Jello Eating
We made 5 packages of cherry-flavoured jello and mixed in wrapped Jolly Rancher candies. Each girl had a pie plate of jelly to eat without using her hands to get the candies out.
Worms and Mud
Basically worms and dirt, except that the Pathfinders didn't feel like breaking up the cookies so they were lumps of 'mud'. We used small paper cups and put a gummy worm in the bottom with half a chocolate pudding cup over it and a cookie on top.
We also attempted to do water marbling, however we discovered that the nail polish we had was too heavy and it did not work (the videos we had watched didn't specify a type of nail polish) - so we hope to try this activity again in the future.
The night ended with lots of clean-up, reminders for next week, and we closed with Taps.
Tonight we took part in our third Girls First activity by getting creative. The activities were all centered around visual arts and we were able to pick and choose which ones to take part in. Some of our feedback included the mess factor on certain activities, the cost of materials for others, and how much our girls enjoyed the activities they did take part in!
We opened with our usual ceremony followed by an active game. Three stations were set up, and the girls were able to choose which they wanted to work on, and the order they would try the activities. Most girls completed all three projects, while a few chose to focus on only one or two.
Activity A - Salty Art
Here the girls painted with watercolours, then sprinkled salt on top of the wet paint. When the paint dries, the salt is brushed off leaving unique patterns on the page.
Activity B - Fabric Art
For this activity, each girl had a white canvas bag and free reign over a variety of craft supplies. We provided felt, pompoms, ribbon, cloth and felt flowers, feathers, twigs, and appliques.
Activity C - Tape Painting
Each girl had a flat canvas to work with and a supply of masking tape and paint. First, they had to create a pattern or design on the canvas using the masking tape, then the areas of canvas still showing were painted. When the paint dried, the tape was removed to reveal a pattern in white amongst the colour.
We ended with evaluating the activities, reminders for next week and Taps.
