"With your Patrol, organise an international evening with games, crafts, food or music and dance."
Our BP Guides decided that they wanted a theme of 'International Food'. With a unit of 30, and having already done a cooperative games evening (and seen how difficult it was to get 40 lively guides to listen to them and follow instructions), they went off to plan a couple of weeks ago.
Last week they came back with their plan to have four stations, with each group visiting a station for 15 minutes, with one girl planning and running their own station. They had agreed as a group what stations (based on what they thought would be enjoyable, could fit into the time and facilities, would work with the number of girls, AND would fit well with the other stations). They did this independently away from the unit - online chat, i think - and came back with their shopping lists if need be.
We had found out during the weeks before that two local schools had school shows and parents evenings on, so we knew numbers would be down to around 22. But on the day itself, we got lots of texts from other parents saying girls were also unable to come due to parents evenings, school discos, and shows, etc....which meant we were left with only 11 girls. I will admit, I was a little disappointed at the last minute notifications (but i understand how it happens). I really don't mind that girls don't come every week, but almost all of the cancellations were down to things that were planned several weeks ago, so it would have been nice to know about these before we had done all the shopping (all edible stuff, mostly non-keepable). And i was also aware that our BP girls might be disappointed with the turnout, giving all the hard work they had put in.
On the night....well, yes, i think there was initially a bit of dismay from a two of our most 'leadery' BP girls ("where is everyone? why haven't they come?")...but that was soon forgotten once they realised that it was going to be a lot more fun and a lot less work than they had anticipated! We were able to have music on in the background, we didn't need to do any 'crowd control', and didn't once have to put our hands up to get people to listen!
We had a fantastic evening! The guides who were there had a fabulous time, and had the time (and resources available) to do extras of activities they enjoyed, and spend more time than they would otherwise have had. We were impressed the leadership and creativeness shown by our BP girls, and their ability to organise and plan. They all enjoyed running their activities, and agreed that actually, it was a lot easier with smaller numbers.
The activities they ran were
- Making and decorating (and eating!) cake-pops from America, along with an american themed quiz and colouring activity.
- Decorating German Gingerbread men
- An international blind food tasting (guess the food!)
- Mehndi from Asia, using chocolate writing icing tubes
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