Significantly more piratey!

Today our training theme was the Caribbean Link Programme. We were only given a copy of this yesterday evening and so we spent the evening swatting up on all of the ins and outs so we would know what we were talking about today. The programme is very chunky and so there was a lot of reading to do!

We were expecting a mixture of leaders and girls today, and so our plan was to split the group and discuss guidelines for implementing the programme with the leaders and do some of the activities from the programme with the Guides. Unfortunately, no leaders turned up so we quickly adapted our plans and did an all inclusive session instead.

We started by quickly explaining the four key areas that Guides part of the Caribbean link are expected to do. These are; Expression and Self Awareness, Environment and You, Service and Looking Ahead. The girls then had to hunt for jigsaw pieces (made out of Frostie packets) with the titles of these on. We asked them to write an activity that they would like to do at Guides that related to each of theses areas on the corresponding pieces. All of this was done whilst holding hands with their partner- just to make it a little bit more challenging.

We then focused on the Looking Ahead section, paying particular attention to time and money management. We played a game in which the girls had to guess how long a minute took to pass. We stopped the game after 3 minutes and some girls still hadn't put their hand up. It was quite amusing and a reminder of what "Island time" really is :D.

Next up was Clare's amazing market money management game. The girls were split into groups and were given a task sheet. Completion of each challenge on the task sheet resulted in the team earning paper money which they could use to buy equipment to complete other challenges. The UK GOLD team formed a group and became very competitive- they got stuck in straight away with a campfire song. However, Clare was feeling very mean and decided to disallow their efforts, making them sing a Guyanese song instead. This was very interesting!  The other groups took a lot longer to organise themselves and needed a little bit of input from Miriam to help them get started, but soon they were really involved and having a great time. The tasks included cutting out the alphabet from a newspaper, and making a pirate hat. This is when the phrase- "you look significantly more piratey" was exclaimed; Jess took several attempts at making a substantial enough pirate hat for Clare's high standards. When the hat was finally deemed good enough, there was much excitement :D The GOLD team had a lot of fun but it was really lovely to see the girls grow in confidence as the challenge went on. Their team work skills improved and in all of the evaluations from this morning, the girls identified it as a highlight from all the training that we have done so far. This made us all very happy :D

We finished the morning session with concentration games and activities. We chose this topic because the girls had completed a survey before we arrived which, after analysis by Bec, showed that the Guides wanted help with study skills. "Hi Harry" was a great game to get the girls to focus (although some of them were pretty terrible at it).

This afternoon more girls turned up- 16 in total, with 4 new ones. This was really positive and makes us feel like the girls are having a good time because they come back day after day! Our focus in this session was Awareness and Expression of Self. We discussed healthy eating and food groups, the importance of good personal hygiene, particularly brushing your teeth, and emotions and feelings. All of this was done through the medium of fun games. This kept the girls moving and engaged; we had lots of younger girls this afternoon. We did however have to keep stopping for water breaks because Guyana has been very hot today!

The session ended with the girls coming up with plays that dealt with some of the topics that we had talked about. The twist was that they had to incorporate some random objects and words into their performance, such as Carrie-Anne, our team mascot, a glue stick and an umbrella. The girls all practiced really hard and the plays were very entertaining, if a little off topic at times!

The evaluation comments have been really positive, although we are not quite sure how many more games and songs we can sing to meet the expectations of some of the girls. They just love all of our silliness!

This evening we are all very excited because we have already finished our planning for tomorrow (it is only 5.30) and we are definitely going to be watching a film because it has finally finished downloading! We are also having Fajitas for tea because we found some wraps in Nigel's. They are going to be soooooo good!

LOGL

Team Guyana
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