Elizabeth's Guiding Corner

 This week we learned about animal scat! Most of the activities we did were from the lesson plan made by Left Brain Crafts. 7:00pm - Welcome and Opening 7:10pm - Animal poop video We watched a video from the Shedd Aquarium about different kinds of animal poop and why they look the way they do:  Sea Curious: What Does Animal Poop Look Like 7:20pm - Animal poop shapes (from the lesson plan) We used playdoh to make different types of animal poop, and talked about the diets of the animals.  7:30pm - More animal poop facts (from the lesson plan) 7:35pm - Animal poop word search (from the lesson plan) The plan was to put the word search on the screen and have everyone work on it together using the annotate feature, but it didn't work for a lot of the girls so we just went straight to the campfire songs. 7:40pm - Campfire songs! These activities didn't take very long so we sang some of our favourite campfire songs! We sang Fire's Burning, The More We Get Together, 40 Years on a...

 This week my Brownie unit had a special guest. My mom, a Community Guider in our area, came to our meeting and lead us in some chemistry experiments. We learned about ink chromatography, and the difference between baking soda and baking powder. For those who don't know: Baking soda is a base and when combined with an acid (like vinegar or lemon juice) it produces carbon dioxide. This is what causes the bubbles in a baking soda and vinegar volcano. Baking powder, on the other hand, contains both an acid and a base, and produces bubbles when combined with any liquid.  Here's some more information on the difference between them.   Here's some information on the pH scale. 7:00pm: Opening and welcome 7:10pm: Baking soda and baking powder To show the difference between baking soda and baking powder we did three experiments on each one, mixing them with water, juice, and vinegar. Here's what you'll need for this experiment: Six bowls or glasses Spoons Baking soda Baking p...

 This week we finally got around to introducing the Discovery Badges to our Brownies. We decided that the best way to teach them how to earn a badge at home was to earn one as a group. As we did the activities I shared my screen and filled out the Maker badge activity sheet (from the  Discovery Badge activity sheets ) so that the Brownies knew which activities went where. Here's what we did: Connect:  For the connect section we learned about NASA aerospace engineer Tiera Fletcher. We also learned a bit about what aerospace engineers do, and how the things they make help us in our daily lives (like the satellites that make our car GPS work).  Here's the slide deck I used. Create: For the  create section we made paper airplanes. We made two different designs and compared how well they flew ( Here's the instructions for the planes we made ). The plan was that the Brownies would make a modification to one of the planes and see if their modification made it fly bette...

We've done a lot of crafts and arts activities so far this year, so we decided to mix it up a bit with an engineering challenge. As I suggested to my co-Guiders, "Let's launch some stuff!". Before we got into designing and building, I showed them what a catapult is and how they work. We looked at some homemade designs and discussed what items would make a good base, and what we could use as the arm of the catapult. At first I got a lot of blank stares, but they slowly started to come up with some ideas. I put the pictures in a slide deck, which you can find here (the pictures of home made catapults were found on Google Images, they are not my own.):  Catapult Presentation Next we got to building. Everyone started with the same basic supplies that my co-Guider delivered in a supplies drop-off a few weeks earlier. They each got some wooden blocks, rubber bands, popsicle sticks, toothpicks, and some small pieces of foam packaging that we suggested they use as the project...