In-Person Meeting: Outdoor Art

We had our first in-person meeting in over six months last night.  It was so good to see the girls!  In person is much more fun than Zoom, at least for the leader (and I'm pretty sure for the girls too).  We met outside, under a patio next to the youth building at my church (we are usually inside the building).  I put four girls at a banquet or  picnic table.

We started work on our Outdoor Art badges. Unfortunately, it was a cloudy night and then sun is going down earlier than it was when I planned this meeting three weeks ago (we had to postpone twice due to weather).  While we are allowed to have indoor meetings, I'm more comfortable outside and I had a couple of parents say they were glad we were staying outside.  

When the girls arrived I handed them the list from the Brownie packet, Step 1, where they look for things outside.  It gave them a good excuse to run around the field.  Actually most of them found most of the things we were looking for.  Next, I sent them out to find something to take a picture of, and asked them to take five pictures of it, some close up and some far away.  This handled Step 4 for both the Brownies and Juniors.  I wish there had been more daylight when we did this.  Also, if we had not been under Covid-19 restrictions about sharing supplies, I would have had the girls pass the cameras around and share their photos.  As it was I asked the parents to post them to our facebook group.

Then we moved to making impressions, something else that would have worked better with more light.  I also think it would have worked better if the leader had purchased white clay rather than terra cotta orange.  Still, they had fun with it and most of the girls took theirs home.  

We ended the meeting by singing Row Row Row Your Boat in round.  None of the girls had every sung a round before.  We are going to have to try Make New Friends in round next time. That was for Step 3 for the Juniors.  We'll do some more on that next time.  

Our next meeting will split the Brownies and Juniors.  The Juniors will work on Digital Photograhy.  I'm going to have a guest speaker (one of the moms) who is a photographer cover step one for both Digital Photography and Outdoor Art.  The Juniors are going to learn about taking portraits both inside and out and whatever else she can come up with.  

My joint meetings are on Monday nights, which has been our meeting time in the past.  The problem with meeting jointly and doing one set of activities is that the program has to be very leader-directed to match up activities/requirements.  I want to get the girls more involved in planning so I decided to make half our meetings split.  Because we are going to be outside, I moved the split meeting to Saturday morning so that we can take advantage of being outside.  Because I have some who can't make it on Saturday, and because the whole point of splitting them is to make at least some of the meetings more girl-directed, for the most part, we won't work on the same badges on Mondays as on Saturdays. 

Are you meeting inside or out this year?  Has Covid made you change how you do things?