November 27th Meeting Recap and Notes

Hi everyone,

Thanks again for being a part of Girl Scouting. Special thanks to Michelle and Michelle (Lauren and Kendra's moms) for helping out today. Without them, the meeting could not have happened!

We had a lot of fun today tying our Girl Scout meeting in with the girls' "Long Ago" unit in school. We played some games that the kids back then would have played. If anyone is interested in more, those came ( loosely adapted) from "Kate Greenway's Book of Games" written by a woman who was born back in 1847. I'll include the rules and the games we played at the end of the email.

We also played some old fashioned outdoor games that the girls really seemed to have a lot of fun doing. We rolled hoops, just like the kids did long ago, and used sticks to play throw-and-catch with smaller hoops.

Finally we went very very very long ago and put on our scientific goggles to do some genuine paleontology. We went back 400 million years (that's pretty long ago indeed) but stayed close to home. We used real paleontologists' tools to clean off fossils from right here in WI. The girls seemed very excited to take them home. If anyone is curious, those fossils were called "pentamerus" and they were brachiopods common in Wisconsin during the silurian era 200-400 million years ago.

Here are the games we played, and the rules we used:

Cat in the Corner
The child who represents the cat stands in the middle. The other children stand around at fixed places. One of the outer children beckons to another and says: “Cat, cat, give me a drop of water!” and the two run to switch places. The “cat” tries to get into one of the spaces. If the cat succeeds, the child that lost a spot is the new “cat.”

Earth, Air, and Water
The children sit in a circle, and one sits in the middle with a handkerchief wrapped in a ball. The child in the middle tosses the handkerchief to one of the others, and says either “Earth,” “Air,” or “Water,” and starts counting to 10. The child that caught the handkerchief then has to say an animal (for earth), a fish (for water) or a bird (for air.) If they can’t do it in time, they move to the middle.

The Feather Game
The players sit close together and one of them takes a feather and blows it into the air. Then they try to keep it afloat just using their breath. The players must sit in their spot, and not stand or move about when keeping the feather in the air.

Hunt the Ring
A ring is threaded on a long string with the ends joined. The players stand in a circle, and the string goes around them. One child stands in the middle. The other children pass the ring from one child to another behind their backs, while the child in the middle tries to guess who has it. If the middle child guesses correctly, they switch places with whoever had the ring.

Who Loves Me?
One child leaves the area while everyone else writes something nice about that child on slips of paper. The first child comes into the room and tries to guess who wrote which slip. Play rotates until everyone gets a turn.

That's about all. I hope to see you at the Lighthouse on Saturday! (As always, if there's a girl that needs a ride, or watching before/after, let me know and we can make any arrangements!)

Aleks Skibicki
Troop 8035