Brownies

I had my first day volunteering with a group of Brownies in Chapel Allerton, Leeds. I was slightly nervous beforehand, I was worried all the volunteers would be old women and wouldn't take to me. However, I was pleasantly suprised when I met the group leader, Hannah, who is 24, a graduate of leeds university. Along with Hannah were 2 other volunteers; Linda and Michelle. The group of Brownies is fairly small, they were unable to take on anymore girls due to the lack of volunteers in the area.

The theme of the meeting was 'feeling happy'.
First of all, we all sat in a circle and shared our news of the week. Hannah, asked the girls to introduce themselves to me as we went around. I then introduced myself, told them a little about myself and showed them some of my work.
We then played a game called 'friendship web'. Using a large ball of wool, we took it in turns to shout someones name out, throw the ball of wool in thier direction and exchange a compliment. You would hold onto the piece of string before throwing again, thus making a web. This also proved a good start to learning the girls names.
Page threw the ball of wall in my direction "Emily, because she is a good artist", and then Kianna, "Emily because she is beautiful".
:)

We then got into pairs, given a card with an emotion written on and were told to go away and practice acting the emotion out. I was paired with a lovely and quite shy girl called Cleo. We had to act out 'caring'. We quickly worked out how to do this so I had time to have a little chat with her and she told me about her favourite school subjects.
We returned to the group and everyone took it in turns to act out thier emotions, I can assure you some of these girls were oscar-worthy.

The session ended by everyone taing it in turns to name one thing that makes them happy. "My cat" "Drawing" "my Brothers" "Going on trips"

One girl called Neve approched me at the end and told me she would bring in her drawings for me to look at next week.


I really enjoyed my first day with the Brownies, and will be returning same time next week.