New Year, New Programme

September brings with it the start of my favourite time of the year, the time of Pumpkin Spice, and changing leaves, and the return to school for a new year after a long break. I was told many times that when I finished university I would stop using the school calendar as my calendar but life as a Brownie leader keeps me in that cycle. I’ve been pretty inactive on this blog for the last couple of years, not posting at all in eleven months.

This new term and new school year is even more of a new start for Guiding because it marks the start of the new programme. I have to admit that initially I wasn’t too sure about the new programme, it seemed confusing and I didn’t see what was wrong with the old one. However, now that I’ve worked out properly how the new programme works I think I am going to like it. I’m definitely someone who learns this sort of thing by doing it so I’ll see properly how I find it in the next few weeks.

In order to help the girls learn more about how the new programme works, my friend from another Brownie pack called Laughing Owl, gave me a build a beatle type game but instead of a beatle they built the new programme things.

The game was relatively simple. What number you roll depends what you get and you have to get all of them to complete the game.

• One = interest badge
• Two = skills builder
• Two again = four hours of unit activities.
• Three = theme award.
• Four = six theme awards
• Five = Gold challenge
• Six = brownie gold award

To add a little competition to the game, I split the girls into two teams, so that the ‘winner’ was the team that had all their players having all the programme parts.

The girls definitely seemed to enjoy the game, and all agreed that it helped with making sense of it which is always a positive.

At the end of last term we had three girls leave, two who were ten and moving on to guides and one who was moving to another city. This took out numbers down to twelve, which is back in the dangerous zone. Thankfully we had two girls join, one who is definitely joining, one who came to see if she liked it and wanted to join. Both seems to enjoy themselves which is always a great.

I love this new year feeling and look forward to getting into the swing of Brownies again.

~Barn Owl