Guide Kit

213/365 - communication problems? by joshfassbind.com

Its common knowledge that Guides communicate an awful lot, normally verbally, and when they’re meant to be listening! Still, the value of their communication and the clarity is often not quite so clear. There are a few challenges and games we have played over the years and used on camp which develops different forms of communication. Often you can adapt a fairly simple challenge to make it more challenging. Here are a few of the recent ones:

Blind Guides

There are lots of variations of communication challenges using blindfolds. Whether they pair up, one blindfolded, to guide the other around a route or to do an activity, describing the steps verbally, or whether the patrol leader is the only one not blindfolded, and guides them to put up a tent, or create something together. You could even play blind football with two leaders telling their players what to do. It might be easier if the players sat cross legged and used their arms to toss and throw the ball towards the goals.

Relaying Messages

If I recall, there is a clause in the Traditions of Guiding badge that requires the team to carry a message by scouts pace. However, as part of a careers day, we had a challenge that went on at the same time as a large group challenge. The challenge leader took a girl aside and gave her a message, ours happened to be based on a customer ordering teapots, but changing the number of teapots in one colour, and adding some teacups to her order. We had to remember names, colours and numbers. Five minutes later, that girl took aside another and passed on the message as accurately as she could – in the same way you play chinese whispers, but obviously a lot more delayed. This continued at regular intervals, while everyone remembered everything else. It always had to be passed on by the most recent guide, and not discussed otherwise. The last person wrote down what they believed the message to be.

To test the verbal skills in a different way, have them describe a structure made out of lego to their group, sat on their hands – or we recently showed the team leaders how to do ‘step through a post card’ and they had to explain how to the group while unable to touch any of the resources or use their hands to describe. Its incredible how much you want to touch to explain, or gesture.

Another way might be to create a model or drawing, which they must recreate as a group, only from the description from one of the group.

Non Verbal Communication

Mime and pictionary are two great ways to take away the reliance on verbal communication. Whether you communicate non verbally to the teams, who have to guess to score points, or the teams take it in turns to send someone up to receive the object or action to convey back, and its the team with the most correctly guessed.

Adapt a Team Building Game

Check out the team building sheets.

9 Types of Fire illustrated by hand, K.Davies 2009, black and white to colour in

Use the above version if you want your group to engage in a little colouring, or if you do not have access to a colour printer. Works well for photocopies too.

9 Types of Fire K.Davies 2009 - Partial Colour

If you don’t want to go the full colour version, here is a partial version with just the fire and logs coloured.

9 Types of Fire K.Davies 2009 - Full Colour

Here is the final, full colour version. Would go well laminated as part of a camp training pack.

The fires are good for badges such as Survival, Active Response, Camper, Camper Advanced. Slice up a photocopy and remove the labels beside to use as a ‘fetch me’ game. Call out the name of the fire, and Guides must hold up or bring the correct illustration to score points. Read the reasoning behind the way the fire is built after. However, nothing does beat actually creating the fires, though I’ve only ever used a handful of the 9 myself, you could be adventurous.

An essential piece of training to have whenever talking or learning about fires is the treatment of burns, and fire precautions. These should go hand in hand with any fire training so that they are well learnt, and instinctive should an emergency arise for the Guides.

I decided to draw a set of fires based off smaller illustrations I found around the web, because I could not find any larger sized illustrations for a game.

One and Other-Mental Health by Victius

Me in Mind is an official Girlguiding UK resource, aimed at older Guides and Senior Section. Its focused on mental and emotional well being, which is a very important part of teenage life, especially for girls. Mental health comes attached with a lot of stigma, but the pack is very positive and has a variety of really good ideas on how to approach difficult subjects. There is a badge for doing the allotted number of activities, but there are so many in the pack, you could do the badge several times over and still have more to spare.

Me in Mind can be purchased at the official Girlguiding UK Shop.

We were keen to try out Me In Mind with our whole unit, which required a bit of adapting and careful selection of the topics. You do become acutely aware of how your opinion and reaction to situation changes between age 10 and 14. Because the pack is copyright, and not written by me, here is my initial account of the evening and the activities we picked out:

The Me in Mind night went terrifically well, and I thoroughly recommend the pack, even for use with your full unit (10 year olds too!) especially if you carefully select the activities. If you have older ones / senior section, of
course they’re better to select with guidance.

We started with the compliment relay game, where you form teams, and each team member goes up to the team piece of paper and writes a compliment about themselves on the paper, runs back and the next one goes. We gave them a 5 minute time limit, and ran two teams of about 10, who managed about 15 per team.
We followed this with a discussion about why it was tricky to compliment themselves (own worst critics etc) and picked out a few and asked the girls to share who they thought in the room deserved the compliment. To finish it off we did a compliment train, where you pay a compliment to the person beside you and they to the person the other side and so on, which the girls really enjoyed and the confidence grew.

Next was the laughing activity, which is a bit difficult to explain, but involves lying with your head on someone else’s tummy, and a head on yours, which had them in fits until some of them were wiping tears of laughter from
their faces. They didn’t believe it was really in the pack because it sounded far too funny a task.

We then used some of the situations in the pack for a unit discussion. Scenarios about friendship, bullies, reactions and emotions to situations. Everyone chipped in with suggestions on how to help the ‘friend’. Before we all talked, I
made it clear we were discussing in confidence, and respecting others opinions, and we heard from some of our quietest guides who had been on the receiving end of hard times with peers at school, and felt quite supported by her Guiding friends subsequently.

A fun finishing activity was the gift activity, where each girl imagines the best gift in the entire world for another girl in the group, ensuring everyone gives and receives one gift – for example, a day with Justin Bieber (cue
swooning from half the unit). They draw out the gift or describe it on paper in five minutes (they wanted to take longer, so we let them) and they share what they have ‘given’ and why, and exchange the paper.

We finished off with some wink murder and badge presentations and sent lots of happy faces off home. Really recommend borrowing/buying a copy to try some of the activities out, even you don’t want to tackle a whole badge. Its huge, and this is just a tiny fraction of the different topics it covers.

The photograph at the top of this post is by Victius at Flickr, and the caption is:

Mental health on the Fourth Plinth (One and Other) performance art in Trafalgar Square, London.

I am standing on the plinth to represent people whose voices so often go unheard, either because they don’t have the necessary support, or they are socially isolated, or they are quite simply desperately marginalized: people with mental health issues.

According to the World Health Organisation, depression will be the second most costly health problem worldwide, coming second only to heart disease and ahead of cancer.

Despite this, however, and despite the fact that around one in four adults will experience them at some point in their lives, mental health problems are still surrounded by ignorance, fear and prejudice.

Research has shown that prejudice against people with mental health issues is actually increasing, despite social attitudes regarding sexuality, ethnicity and other similar issues improving.

Waratahs by vivevans

What makes a good patrol leader? These flash cards can be used with just the patrol leaders as a training, or with the whole unit before they elect new patrol leaders. Give the cards out randomly and then form two piles “essential for being a patrol leader” “not essential” and they can make a decision on each of the attributes to form the piles. Provides healthy discussion on why its not necessarily the best reason to vote for someone who’s bossy, just because they’d think they’d be a good PL! What Makes a PL (.ppt for powerpoint)

Here are a collection of teambuilding games, set out on one per A4 piece. Some of them work with the whole unit as one group, some better in small groups. Laminate the ones for smaller groups and you can use them at camp or on an evening as a round robin. Either right click and save as, or left click, wait for them to load, and save the image. Alternatively, download the lot: team building (zip)

I didn’t create any of these ideas, but have either encountered them or noted them down from the Internet. This may help BP Guides complete the co-operative games clause, and fit with the team player badge.

tap by s e l v i n

The Active Response Badge covers basic first aid, and the grounding of what to do in many emergency situations, including turning off utilities such as gas, looking after yourself while hiking, and water safety.

Several of the clauses can be covered in an evening round robin session, discusing hypothermia, heat exhaustion, turning off utilities, how to prepare for hikes, at also trying an emergency shelter out with a groundsheet. By keeping the discussion short, quickfire with questions and answers, rather than just one way, the Guides are far more likely to remember, and may also contribute experiences which make the learning process more memorable.

Here are some useful handouts including images for several of the clauses: Active Response Night

These A4 BP Challenge Zone Posters can be put on a board, or are excellent laminated, for the Guides to pick the clauses they would like to complete. One for each zone, and another for a noticeboard, or Guider notes. Right click and save as, or left click and wait for the image to load up, before saving it.

Montana Paint & Graffiti Art by Daniel Greene

Unofficial go for it suitable for older guides and senior section. Covers issues such as drugs, alcohol, law and other issuse that relate to being safe. Would fit well with the personal safety badge.

Go For It Streetwise (Unofficial Go For It) (.doc format)

Doctor Who series 5 filming, Roald Dahl Plas by Claire-Elizabeth

This is an UNOFFICIAL, UNSANCTIONED, NON PROFIT go for it activity pack based off Doctor Who with images from the 2nd and 3rd series with David Tennant.

The go for it includes:

• Teambuilding games
• Dalek Cake (from BBC’s Blue Peter)
• Create a Monster
• Anger Management
• Rocket Racing
• Decision Making
• First Aid
• Esperanto
• and more!

All in full colour, pdf, just like a real Go For It.

The downloads are quite large (~20MB)

Go For It Dr Who (PDF)

Go For It Dr Who (PDF compressed in a ZIP)

Go For It Dr Who (PDF compressed in a RAR)

Much lower resolution version is far quicker to download (<3mb)

G4I Doctor Who (Lo-res PDF)

skipping by ntheodore

Blast From the Past is an official Go For It, which covers historical activities. Blast from the Past Activities are useful to help run activities as a unit to fill parts of the Go For It. They may be suitable for a round robin evening where Guides move as groups from table to table to complete the activities. There is also a quiz.