New Girlguiding Programme - record sheets for girls older guides, and for those who lose their badge books

So, Girlguiding has launched a new programme For Every Girl, from Rainbows up to Rangers. Here is the official overview. 

Guides will now all have to buy  a new Badge Book which contains all of the clauses for the interest badges, and to record all of their progress.  However, I know that most of these will get lost/mislaid within the first couple of weeks of owning them, and at £8 a shot, I can't see parents replacing them very often.  

So with help and inspiration from another guider, i've put together a record sheets on which girls can record their progress on a single page. These will be left in our patrol boxes in the hall, so less chance of losing them. Also means i can take them all home a the end of term and update the GO records accordingly.






Guides who complete a Skills Builder level in all 6 themes, plus an interest badge in all 6 themes, plus 5 hours worth of unit meeting activities in all 6 themes, are eligible to start the Guides Gold Award Challenge. If they complete this, they are awarded the Gold Award.  

It is intended that with the new programme, it will take girls 2-3 years to achieve the Gold Award. With this in mind, girls who have achieved 2 Guide Challenge Badges (ie. been in guides for at least 2 years), and have less than 2 years left in guiding (i.e. aged 12 or above) have some alternative ways to achieve the Gold Award.

For girls who have completed 10 (or nearly 10) of their BP clauses by July 2019, they can then do the Gold Award Challenge instead of a BP Adventure, and be awarded the Gold Award (instead of the BP Award).








For girls who have not started the BP, or don't want to continue with BP clauses for the next year, they can do 2 skils builer stage badges (in different themes), plus new interest badges (1 in each of 3 themes), followed by the Guides Gold Award Challenge.  They will then be awarded the Gold Award.










DOWNLOAD LINK: Doc and PDF versions of these files are here, if you want them.

UM16 BP International Evening

Our four BP girls wanted to organise an International Evening for the unit. The Zone 2 (Global Awareness) clause says:

"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

UM2 Circus Skills Night - Shooting Stars!

Unit Meeting 2

We had a visitor from Shooting Stars Circus Skills tonight - what a fabulous night it was!

Juggling skills
The guides spent about half the session learning how to juggle with scarves. This is the most fundamental and most useful circus skill one can learn; it helps in all areas of life, and can help with coordination, sports, learning musical instruments, and all kinds of other activities.

The girls did really well, and even those who thought they would never be able to juggle were able to juggle with 3 scarves by the end of the evening. And from there, they now know enough to be able to progress on their own

Free time with other circus equipment
After this, the guides had free time to experiment with the other circus equipment that Paul had brought along, with guidance from Paul when necessary.  They all had a try at these and had a great time.

• unicyles
• juggling with other things
• skill hats & wigs
• fire sticks
• diabolo
• pedally things
• mini bikes
• wiggle skate-boards

All in all, this was a fantastic evening, highly recommended, and good value for money with a group of 28-30 guides.