Postcard Exchange

7 Postcards have arrived so far! It is very exciting wondering if there is going to be a postcard waiting for you when you arrive home...!

This week at Brownies we looked over our postcard design and the girls wrote their messages. The messages will be stuck to the postcards and sent out this week, to all over the world. We are exchanging with Girl Scouts from England, America, Canada, Japan, Australia and Vietnam.

We also played a couple of our favourite games - Mummy, Daddy, Baby and Pale Pink Pyjamas. We had a pow-wow to discuss what we wanted to do this term and mainly had suggestions for new games! A few people wanted to do the Artist badge and we'd like to visit places like the museum, the cinema and the Zoo.

I'd like to go to the Zoo to visit the new pandas!

I will scan our postcards soon so you can all see :)


Bye for now,

FB

Winter Seasons badge

This week was our second back, although last week we only had 2 Brownies! This week we were finishing up our Seasons badge, so we had lots to do. It was all very busy and messy so we had no chance to take photos!

First we played tig and a couple of games of Port and Starboard. After that we moved into 3 stations:
We made some bird seed cakes from the RSPB youth site although Kestrel and Merlin couldn't get the microwave to work properly so it took ages for the lard to soften (it was a very frosty day!).
We also planted bulbs in glass jars so we can watch the roots grow, and finally we decided what we wanted to write on our postcards for the Postcard Exchange.

After all that it was a rush to get finished in time for the parents waiting outside! Next week we're having a quieter one, writing postcards and doing a bit of handbook work. Hopefully the postcards will get scanned in and appear here soon....

Oh and some sad news, one of the ladies who helps out with the other Brownies (occassionally, she's quite old now) was mugged just up from our meeting place on Sunday evening. She was pushed to the ground and quite badly injured, but she should be okay. It makes you think when something like that happens to someone you know, near where you are.


That's all for now,

FB

Winter Snowglobes

It was very busy just before the Christmas holidays, so sorry for only updating now! In December we played a bunch of our favourite games, made some Christmas cards and had a party for our last night. We also tried making snowglobes!

Merlin was organising this craft and managed to rustle up lots of nutella jars with the snap-on lids so that our snowglobes all looked the same. Simple enough idea - stick a decoration to the lid of the jar, fill the jar with water and glitter and glue the lid on top.


1 tsp of glitter in a jar like this was a good amount. We had lots and lots of glitter so we all chose different colours. For our decorations, we decided to use a glittery pine-cone decoration to stick onto the lid.

But

When we turned them upside down the decoration came unstuck! Oh nooo. Never mind, the girls still liked them, When you shake the jar the decoration whirls around inside the glitter too. They'll just have to be a new craft called SNOWSTORM.

Safe in the dark

As part of our seasons badge, we were learning about the best clothes to wear for walking around the city on the early dark evenings. Here in Edinburgh it starts getting dark just after School is finished. 22nd December was the shortest day of the year in 2011 and the sun came up at 08:43 and set at 15:40, meaning we had less than 7 hours of daylight!

There are lots of good websites with online activities for road safety, I especially like Tales of the Road and there are some good printable worksheets here. We used the last couple of pages of the "Streetsense level C booklet - Activity 1" To design a jacket and a backpack with reflective and fluorescent materials.

Of course we also had a bit of fun with dressing up!

We discussed how best to be seen in the dark (wearing reflective things), how best to be seen when it's nearly dark or foggy (BRIGHT) and how not to dress (all in dark colours).

It was a lot of fun. We have a few more things left to do to get our Winter Seasons badge because we have already learnt about different Winter festivals. We'll be finishing that off at the beginning of next term.