Sunday, December 11, 2016

Francophone Books





We have a Francophone pair of sisters in our units this year.  I was talking to mum and dad at the end of October and realized that while they may speak ok English, they have a hard time reading in English, and the English books they'd gotten for their daughters were just kinda sitting around their house, not being read at all.  Let's face it - definitely at Spark age, and mostly at Brownie age, parents need to at least help their child read the books.

So how do we fix this problem?

I remembered reading (I can't remember where, might have been ANY Guide News, our Area Newsletter, The Guidepost or Canadian Guider) somewhere that there was a special printing of the Guide books (all of them, not just Sparks and Brownies) and that you could purchase them.


So I checked with Quebec - follow the link under the picture - you fill out their form, and (for a much higher fee) will send you the books that are in French!  I can't wait to see the smiles on their little faces!

As a warning, though, the books are expensive, as is the shipping fee.  I'll be contacting our provincial office on Monday to see if they'll subsidize the fee at all.  As leaders, however, we have decided that we will make sure the parents don't have to pay more than other parents do for the book.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Christmas Guider Meeting

For our Guider Meeting this year our Commissioner had a few cool ideas.

The first is that we were going to train right before the meeting.  Our training adviser spent the first half hour doing a SafeGuide training.  It's a great idea to put training in a Guider Meeting - first of all we are all there to begin with, and secondly - it's always important to do the training.  Makes it a bit easier to do the leading that we're trying to do!


Then we had our meeting.


Then we had a gift exchange.  For the gifts our challenge was that the gift we brought for exchange had to be handmade by us.  I made a scarf, and others bought homemade jams, chocolates, bubble bath, Christmas decorations, and a decorated planter with plant!

One of the other leaders made up a pass left/right game using all of our names and it was a blast!

Volunteering!

This week we went to our local senior's centre to volunteer.

The girls made a simple craft, sang a few standard Christmas songs (we have a few Francophone girls so we also sang a verse of Petit Papa Noel).

Then the lodge gave the girls a small snack and then we went home.