Brownie Camping Summer 2013 (#1)

It was a success (for the most part)! And I’m glad we got to do a “practice” run with only 5 girls/parents (one girl was a last minute cancel). My now official assistant leader (AL) and I pulled it off with help from other parents. I don’t know how I would run this troop without the level of involvement the parents have.

Anywho.

If I had to sum up our trip in five words, they would be:

Hot
Hike
Bird
Chopping
Thunderstorm

Hot – Oh boy was it hot outside – in the 90s with very high humidity. We lucked out that 1) our campsites were right next to the drinking fountain/spigot, and 2) we had no neighbors to share it with. One of the moms called a family member to bring a hose and sprinkler, which we then hooked up to the spigot. The girls spent a good chunk of their downtime playing in the water. Yes, they went through a lot of water, but they had fun, kept cool, and didn’t whine.

Hike – Yesterday we went on our beaver lodge hunting hike with the Parks dept. They came to our campsite and talked about beavers for about 15 minutes. The girls were able to hold and touch a pelt. Then we piled into two vehicles and drove to the trail head. We saw a bunch of strange mushrooms on the trailside, a blue heron, got a brief history lesson about how the British used one of the inlets we walked past to hide during a daytime stop en route to try to take Fort Niagara away from the French….and we saw the beaver lodge. By “we” I mean the girls and not me since I brought up the back and didn’t get a chance to see it before our guides turned us around.

Back at the trailhead, we went down a different path to the lake shore. The girls spent about 15-20 minutes wading in and throwing rocks. Good times were had by all except when we were bitten by flies.

Beaver-chewed stump.

Lake fun.

Bird – One of the highlights of our trip, and sure to be one of the things that will be brought up ad nauseam for the remainder of the girls’ time in scouts is the bird in the tent.

Chopping – In addition to planning out our meals, I wanted the girls to prep them as well. Bean was gifted some vinyl knives for her birthday, so I brought them along. It’s a bit more tricky to cut fruit and vegetable with them, but the girls managed. And they managed better once I showed them how to properly cut – sawing doesn’t work. They cut cantaloupe, onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, and bananas.

Thunderstorms – Our camping trip went out with a bang, so to speak. Around dinnertime on Friday, families started calling/texting to tell us a nasty storm system was on its way. We watched the doppler and figured it was something we could ride out if we put the girls in a van to watch movies, and removed all items that would be damaged by wind and rain. Everyone was inside various vehicles by the time storm #1 hit. It lasted about an hour and a half, and because the doppler showed no further precipitation, we decided to get the fire going again and finish out the night.

About 45 minutes later, nature called us out on that by unleashing a torrent of rain. Phones were whipped out once again to check the doppler, which showed a long line of storms, mostly red, right over us. Because it looked like that storm would last most of the night, we decided to abandon the tents and call it a night. Even though all of us live within a 10 mile radius of the campsite, it was fairly scary getting home. Visibility was almost nil.

The storms lasted until around 2:30am…or that’s when Bug finally stopped screeching and clinging to me every time there was a clap of thunder. Bean, surprisingly, slept through the whole thing.

We went back to our site the following morning to breakdown the tents and to cook breakfast. All of the tents were still standing, though several had partially collapsed. Only one had a small lake inside (the waterproof covering was blown off).

Brownie Camp Planning #2

Tonight was our second, and final, pre-camping meeting before our trip next week. The girls finished up the details of their menus, roughed out a packing list, built a campfire, and roasted marshmallows. I’m not going to outline it since we didn’t do a lot of things.

The first item of business was to finish menu planning. Each team is in charge of one breakfast and one dinner. I’ll plan out our lunch. Here’s what we ended up with:

Thursday Dinner
Spider Dogs
Honey Dew Melon
Baby Carrots and Potatoes
Milk
Mints

Friday Breakfast
Eggs
Pancakes/Waffles
Watermelon
Cereal
Juice

Friday Dinner
Pizza Pockest (made using pie irons)
Corn
Watermelon

Saturday Breakfast
French Toast
Sausage
Fruit Kebabs

We’re also going to finish up our Snacks Badge whilst camping – make something sweet (s’mores) and a snack for energy (nut-free gorp).

Once the girls and moms finished up their menu planning, we started working on our packing list. They did a good job with it. One of the girls got incredibly detailed, down to the number of shirts, etc… to bring (her family camps a lot). I didn’t get too in depth because every mom is going too, but I’ll zip out an email with the final list. Unlike when we’ve lodge camped, we’re bringing shower supplies this time. Mostly because it will be a good way to cool off in the heat.

The final part of the evening was campfire building. DH was awesome and set everything up at our fire pit. I went over tinder, kindling, and logs, showing the girls examples of each. I also showed them how to build both teepee and log cabin fires. Then they took turns building a fire from the tinder up.  It took a bit of finagling on the part of myself, my husband, and one of the moms to get the fire going well (definitely need fire starters!), but we did it, and the girls roasted marshmallows. And played in our sand pile. And on our rope swings.

Brownie Camp Planning #1

Tuesday, June 18th was the first meeting for planning our camping trip in July (I’m a bit late in posting this). I held it in my house since it’s summer-ish (and we’ve been done with regular meetings for over a month), and I learned that I will never hold regular meetings in my house – it was crazy!We were able to accomplish everything I wanted to, so that’s good. I planned a little on the light side since the parents have a tendency to show up between 10-15 minutes late to meetings (something that I will address at our parents’ meeting this fall).

Meeting Outline
Opening Circle
Overview of agenda
Go over Canadian Girl Guide Badges to be earned
Intro to Meal Planning
Mess Kits/Highlights of our trip
Edible Fire
Closing Circle

Girl Guide Badges: After doing our Opening Circle and giving the girls a brief outline of what we were going to do, I launched into the two Canadian Girl Guide Badges we’re going to earn at our camp out:

*Be Aware
*Cookout

You can tell from just these two pages that there are lot more “scouting”-type badges offered for the Canadian girls versus the US girls. I don’t understand why GSUSA seems to think that our girls don’t like science/outdoors activities (but that rant is a whole ‘nother post).

Meal Planning: Once we we finished talking about the badges, I divided the girls into two groups so they could start planning meals. Each group will plan and prepare a breakfast and dinner. I’m in charge of lunch on Friday. One mom is in charge of each group. They’ll finalize menus at our next meeting.

Mess Kits: And because I forgot to go over mess kits before we started meal planning, I did it afterward. DH pulled about 50 kits from a dumpster on base a while ago, and the girls can use those (if they want). I showed them my kit, and explained why I have each item. I’ll send an email out so parents know what to get for their kit. Dunk/wash in soap water, rinse in plain water, dip in bleach water, and hang to dry. Simple! Easy!

Trip Highlights: I also forgot to go over some of the highlights of our trip, so I went over them after we talked about mess kits. I set up a nature walk with the NYS Parks Dept (they are an amazing resource) for Friday morning. We’re going to see if we can find the beaver lodge that is reputed to exist on the creek the campground is named after.

Friday afternoon will be relatively low-key since it’s going to be hot as the dickens in mid-July (yay for a lot of large shade trees on our camping sites!).  We’ll also do some of the Sharpie tie-dying I did with the Daisies (bandanas this time), probably jump roping, and possibly something involving water balloons.

Edible Fire: The final activity of our meeting was edible fire. I want to teach the girls how to build a proper fire, and thought that starting with a snacky-type activity would be good. We’ll start looking at the actual components of fire next time.

*Marshmallows – fire circle
*Shredded carrots – tinder
*Thin pretzel sticks – kindling
*Pretzel logs – logs
*Candy corns – flames (not shown)
*Cup of juice – water bucket (not shown)

GS Camping Training

At the very last minute, I was able to join the last session for Levels I & II training for camping offered by our Council. It is my fault for not doing this sooner, but I had been hoping to set something up for several leaders/moms in my SU (this ended up falling through). One of my moms is Level I trained, but because we’re taking the Brownies tent-camping in July, someone needed to do Level II.

Three weeks ago, I had the first session of the training (about 2 hours long). We spent most of it discussing what to bring to camp (the group as a whole and as individuals) and planning our meals (menu, ingredients, and any tools necessary to get the job done).

There were 12 leaders in the group, and we were broken down into groups of four to plan three meals. My group ended up with dinner. We chose hamburgers and hotdogs (all meats must be pre-cooked/par-cooked, nothing raw is allowed), potato salad, macaroni salad, and foil packet-cooked zucchini. We also planned dessert (the s’more cones my troop did last June).

Last weekend was the overnight portion of the training. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but then, I don’t really know what I was expecting. All of the women there had camped before, so it almost felt like a refresher with a few new tidbits thrown in. We spent a lot of the time talking – which was great because now I have some fun ideas for troop games and fundraisers.

The bulk of the trip focused on knots, lashing, basic pocket knife safety, making fire starters, building campfires, intro to compass reading, and the technicalities of camping with a large group of girls. We also had to share some of the fun stuff that was successful with our girls (from my troop, I shared how we taught them how to jump rope, and that the game, Daisy Islands, was a hit). This sharing time  is where I picked up new games, or new variations of games we’ve tried before.

Games (I only have the names of some of them, so some internet searching will be involved)
*Another version of the hula hoop game we played with Quest. With this one, you have several different sized hoop going around the circle, and you step through it to pass it from one person to another (everyone is holding hands and the hoops are on your arms).
*Birdie on a Perch
*Ships and Sailors
*The Human Knot

Meals
Lunch (in the lodge, so a stove was available) – grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, chips, fruit (apples, oranges, pears, bananas), and soda/tea.
Dinner (campfire) – hot dogs, hamburgers, macaroni salad, potato salad, foil-packet zucchini, and dessert s’more cones
Breakfast (campfire) – french toast, sausage, orange juice, fruit (see above), and coffee.

Fall Brownie (Not So) Camp Out 2012

Our camp out was rained out courtesy of a cold front that decided to move in. No campfire or walk in the woods. *sigh* BUT, even though we were stuck in the lodge the entire time we were there, the girls had a BLAST!

The girls did a great job with their respective meals, which all turned out well. The only difference is that the next time we do this, I’ll create a formal kaper chart instead of just asking various girls to wash dishes, sweep, etc…

We worked on the Home Scientist Badge, completing 3 of the 5 steps. Both the dinosaur snot and mentos geyser were huge hits. If you need a way to kill 30+ minutes, dinosaur snot is a good way to go.

The girls learned how to tie knots – square knot, bowline, clove hitch, and overhand. They used those skills to tie each other up. No-So-Fearless-Leader has a very useful blog post about knot-tying. It is worth checking out for learning how to tie knots, and activities to do once the girls have learned them.

And because we had a 22′ length of rope and a huge empty indoor space, we jumped rope. And none of the girls had ever done this before. What the heck are kids doing at recess? Jumping rope and singing the chants (Cinderella dressed in yella’… or teddy bear, teddy bear turn around…) was one of the most popular ways to kill time when I was in elementary school.

So, two parents turned the rope, and I hopped in to show the girls what to do (most of the other moms, and a couple dads had a go too). It took a good 10 minutes before the girls lost their fear of jumping into a turning rope. And even after several hours of practice throughout the weekend, only one girl was a pro at making it in, jumping, and then jumping out without hitting the rope. We will be working on this more.

And if I’m feeling really sadistic, I’ll make them learn how to double dutch.

I’m still in shock that they had never seen or done this kind of jumping rope before. It just boggles.

Second Brownie Meeting

In keeping with flow of our previous meeting, this one went well too. Pretty much the entire meeting was sitting and talking, and the girls acted with only minimal silliness. We did start 15 minutes late, but that ended up being for the best since both content and attention spans were over by our normal ending time.

What we did:

After Opening Circle, each girl pulled two pieces of paper out from a jar. Each piece of paper had a line of the GS Law written on it. I gave the girls poster board strips to write the lines on. It took them a good 15 minutes to do this part. A parent and my assistant leader also wrote on the strips; they had the title and opening line.

Once they finished, they had to put the lines in order. This took a fair amount of prompting from me since they aren’t familiar with the order. I asked them visualize the petals from our Daisy Petal Board (scroll to the bottom of the post), which seemed to help.

After the lines were in order, we went through the Law line by line, briefly talking about what each line meant.

I had planned on segueing into troop rules at this point, but I skipped that line on my outline by accident and went straight into talking about possible badges to earn. The girls came up with a mix of new badges, old Try-Its (I have a bunch of them hoarded), and Council’s Own (hopefully I can still get my hands on them).

The top choices:
Pets (new)
Potter (new)
Stitch It Together (old)
Archery (Council’s Own)
science (no specific badge was requested for this one, just science, and I’m assuming this means they want experiments, experiments, experiments)

Badges they’ll earn this year, regardless:
Brownie GS Way
Snacks
Painting (YES!! to having an asst. leader who has an art degree and used to teach classes at a local art museum!)
Senses (we have to finish up Touch, which I’ll do during our first field trip)
Going Camping (Girl Guides of Canada – GGC)
Cook Out ( planning meals for a camp out, GGC)
Be Aware (campfire safety, GGC)
Which Way (basic compass reading, GGC)

Next we moved onto Troop Crests. It is going to take a bit of time to get the girls to agree on one crest.  Five girls gave me five choices, with several voting for more than one. We’ll do another vote at our next meeting. I want to make sure they truly want what they get since it is a reflection on what they stand for and want to accomplish as a troop.

The top choices:
Arrow (1 vote)
Bluebird (1 vote)
Lightning (1 vote, made by a Pokemon fan)
Unicorn (2 votes)
Waterfall (2 votes)

The final order of business tonight was to start talking about our upcoming camp out.  There is a strong possibility that one girl won’t be able to stay the night.  I want to make sure she can participate in as much as she can, so some of the critical activities will be planned around how long she can stay, and if she’s able to come back the following day.

I put five counters in the bag, two different colors. The above mentioned girl pulled first to set the color for dinner. Three girls will plan dinner and two will plan breakfast. At our next meeting, they’ll start planning what they want to do. I’ll make sure to have a parent assigned to each group since they will have to help with the preparation of the given meal. I’m curious to see what they come up with.

And because the talk of food brought up the lack of snacks this evening, I pointed out that we’ll start working on the new Snacks badge at our next meeting. The girls are excited about the prospect of making their own snacks. The kicker is that they will have to try at least one bite of each thing they make.  Last year, we had a bit of trouble at times when girls didn’t want to taste a new food, but I didn’t push it at the time. Because making the food is the badge, they will have to have a bite. No bite, no badge.

Daisy Camp Out: Sunday

The girls woke up before 7am on Sunday. They were generally quiet as they poked around the fairy houses while the moms still slept.  Most everyone was awake when I turned the lights on at 7:30. The girls got dressed and packed up their sleeping bags, etc… before we had breakfast.  Breakfast consisted of freezer bag omelets and biscuits from scratch. The girls helped cut out the biscuits. (I completely forgot about singing grace that morning until we were on our way home – “Rise and Shine.”)

After breakfast, the girls played outside (more stone soup) while the adults chatted for a bit. Then we went for a walk around the camp. One set of cabins was empty so we poked around that site. I definitely want to get the girls out to that particular campsite at some point. I need (or our camping mom needs) to complete the second level of camping training first.

The final things on our camping agenda were to do Taste and Smell for the Senses Try-It. For Taste, I made samples of salt water, sugar water, lemon juice, and unsweetened chocolate (melted and mixed with some water). I went over the four types of taste buds with the girls, asking if they knew what they were called. They each got some q-tips to dip in the solutions. I didn’t tell them where on their tongues the various taste buds were. Part of the experiment was to see if they could determine it by where they touched the q-tip to their tongues.  When we were finished, I showed them a diagram of the tongue and explained that the different buds overlap. I also explained that the majority of our sense of flavor comes from our nose, which is why when your nose is stuffy, you can’t really taste anything.

Smell was last. The girls partnered up (because Bean decided to pout under the table, there were two pairs of two), one was blindfolded, and the other had to lead her around the room with a smelly object. The choices were a cut up onion, crushed mint, or a lemon. When they were finished, they switched. Two things to know for next time – no shoes and no talking/giggling – it made it easier for the blindfolded girl to follow her ears and not her nose.

When we finished our experiments, the girls and I did Closing Circle while several of the moms put together some sack lunches. Once those were made, they snuck outside to hide them (Jungle lunches). The girls had to hunt for their lunch. They had to help each other find lunches if someone had trouble.

Campsite For the Troop is Reserved!

I received an email yesterday indicating we got our first choice of dates for our campout. Really, it’s campout-lite since we’ll be sleeping in the lodge of the camp, but I don’t think Daisies are allowed to use the cabins or primitive sites. I’m certified in CPR/First Aid, and one of the mom’s took the requisite camping course last month.  I would like as close to a 1-to-1 ratio as possible given the girls’ ages. The lodge holds 27 people, so it won’t be quite the ratio I want if all of the girls are able to go.

Now, I need to start figuring out what we’re going to do. Since most of the girls will be Bridging to Brownies, we’ll probably have them earn their first Try-It: Senses. The name is fairly self-explanatory.  One of the requirements is a scavenger hunt, which fits in nicely to one of the things I wanted the girls to do. Earn Try-It, learn some camp songs, and maybe make a sit-upon are my ideas at the moment. There’s still 6 months to get everything down. One thing’s for sure…it’s going to be a blast!