Brownies/Guides
Girlguiding.

1st South Creake Girl Guides.

1st South Creake Guides is a thriving Guide unit, open to any girl aged 10yrs to 14 yrs of age who wishes to join. We meet weekly and follow the 5 point programme of The Girl Guide Association – which means we have lots of fun while learning about ourselves, helping others and developing skills for life.

We meet on a Friday evening during term time and nearly every term we manage to fit in a sleepover, weekend away or a camp! We always have a theme for these residential events and will often try new crafts, health and beauty themes, basic camping skills and even advanced camping! This term we are working on the Olympia Challenge and the Traditions of Guiding Badges. We will also be able to gain the holiday badge and craft badge at our weekend holidays as well as Go For It take Your Toothbrush and Go For It Flights of Fancy! We love to be busy and not just chat!

We get to chose which items of uniform we wear out of Guide Wear Collection or can be easily identified by our 1st South Creake Royal Blue tops.

Our Guider is called Alirae Bunkle and she says you might like to know a bit about the history of South Creake Guides. Our Unit was first Registered with Guide HQ in London in 1955! That means we are over 50 years old (and to celebrate being 50 in 2005 we went to one of the World Centres in Switzerland for a weeks’ holiday – it was fab!) During this time there have only been 2 Guiders in Charge – Miss Elizabeth Sands who started the Unit and ran it until she was 60yrs old and Alirae who joined as a 10 year old and has never left since! (and Alirae is no where near 60 years old yet so she says we have her for a bit longer yet!)

So, if you are a girl who likes a challenge, whether or not you have been a Rainbow or Brownie, and you are 10-14 yrs old, why not come and join us?

Further details are available from Alirae on 01485-528687

1st South Creake Rangers, for girls aged 14 to 25 yrs old, is also run by Alirae and we don’t meet weekly but get together for special events during a term, sometimes at weekends and often help as extra staff at the Guide Camps and Holidays. We work on a Senior Section Programme which really helps us to get ready for life after school and learn a lot more about who we are and what really matters to us, whilst enjoying ourselves in a relaxed atmosphere! If you are interested in joining us give Alirae a ring.

Happy Birthday Guiding!

As you may have read in various newspaper reports, Girl Guiding is now heading into it's centenary year. The first group of girls wanting to become 'Scouts' crashed the Crystal Palace Rally for Boy Scouts in September 1909. Baden-Powell, recognising that these young ladies had a valid request but feeling their activities should be seperate to those of the Boy Scouts, asked his sister Agnes to oversee what was to be named the Girl Guides (named after a group of Mafeking Guides BP had worked with and had the utmost respect for). And so Girl Guiding began, formally, in 1910.

We are entering a year of celebrations to mark our very special year.

As part of the start of these celebrations, you will remember that last time, I told you all about our programme plans for doing the Time Traveller badge while we were away at the windmill for camp this year. You will be very pleased to know that all the Guides passed their badges, and their Holiday Badges, Party Planner Badges, Agility Badges and Go-For-It Blast From The Past!!!

The girls were superb all week; it was a pleasure to be away with them and the team of adults, put together especially for this camp, worked brilliantly. I never mind giving up a week's annual leave for the Guides but when everything runs as smoothly as this camp did, it is nothing but a pure pleasure to be away with them.

As part of their activities we had a fabulous evening with Stephen Wilshire and his team of coastguards, at their headquarters in Wells. Ellie particularly enjoyed being strapped into their roll-up stretcher! Of course, if you happen to be in Wells you just have to have chips on the quay first, followed by ice cream! What a gorgeous evening out. We also walked to the beach at Burnham Overy and the girls enjoyed doing the clauses of their agility badge on the sand and in the shallows of one of the little channels - we were blessed with very good weather for most of the week. I felt the open evening for parents, campfire and BBQ, went well and have had some lovely letters of thanks since the event. It was a very special evening as Rachel was presented with her Baden-Powel Award, the highest award a Guide can achieve, and June Ringwood was presented with her 50 year Thanks Badge for 50 years of continuous service to South Creake Guides. What a marvelous commitment June has shown and I hope many of you reading this will, at this point, be smiling and thinking of fun things you did with June over the years! Have you ever been on a lion hunt with her at campfire and spoken 'sodawaterbottle'?

The siblings were able to sleep over at the windmill after the campfire, as I felt it was immportant to allow as many people as possible to experience wonders of this magnificent building. Again, our thanks have to go to the Burnham Market Craft Fair team for giving us the grant that allowed us to afford to be able to go to the windmill.

Autumn term has begun now and we have welcomed 2 new guides into our small company and 2 guides have gone up to rangers, so we remain quite a stable unit. More next time of our antics this term!

Alirae Bunkle, Guide Guider - 1st South Creake Guides.

Summer 2009 News-letter

You must read these articles and think Alirae’s favourite word is busy – and yet we have had another really busy term! We have had 2 new Guides join us at the beginning of this term. The girls all completed last term’s WAGGGS challenge to ‘Change The World’ and supported the Homeless Charity Shelter and the WWF in doing so. This term they have moved on to their Fitness Go-For-It and have started work on their Time Traveller Badge which will be completed during their summer camp, this year at Burnham Overy Windmill, very kindly made possible for us by a grant from the Burnham Market Craft Fair team. As the windmill could double as a Tardis, and the Time Traveller Badge has been devised by a group of Irish Guiders to support our journey into what will be Girl Guidings’ Centenary Year, it seemed a very appropriate theme for the holiday.

Let’s see if this stirs any memories for former Guides out there – the girls will start the week as Recruits, then become Tenderfoot Guides, progress to Second Class Guides after completing the appropriate challenges and hopefully will end the week all as First Class Guides! I even have some of the old badges to show the girls in the box I inherited from Miss Elizabeth Sands and know she would be thrilled we have chosen this as a theme for this year’s camp.
If any of you have memories of what you had to do to progress through the ranks do write in and tell us!

The girls also want to do their Party Planner Badge (one of the new syllabus badges not around in Elizabeth’s day) so our camp fire has become a special party this time with the girls devising lovely invitations for our honoured guests and planning a BBQ menu so all can be well fed before the challenge of joining in with our energetic camp fire activities! Let’s hope the weather is kind to us so we can round the evening off with toasted marshmallows and hot chocolate!

The monthly Soup Lunches remain a popular event in the village calendar and for the summer months we changed to Ploughman’s with a cold pudding but will revert to soup and crumbles in October – there is no Soup Lunch in September so we don’t clash with another annual village event.

Alirae Bunkle, Guide Guider - 1st South Creake Guides.

Autumn 2008 News-letter

What a busy Autumn Term the Guides had – we welcomed 4 new guides at the start of term and one Guide transferred to us when one of the Fakenham Guide Units closed in early December.

The girls all completed their Traditions of Guiding Badge and Annual Challenge Badges which I told you about last time but, just after I had written the piece for the last magazine I heard about the WAGGGS (World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts) Olympia badge especially designed by the Chinese Guide Association to mark the Beijing 08 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Enjoying rising to a good challenge the girls all agreed they were up to the task of tackling this badge as well as the ones we already had planned! So last term’s programme ended up being one of the most diverse and interesting I have ever delivered. Topics covered ranged from how to fold a flag and hoist Colours, whistle signals, horseshoe formations and knotting for the traditions badge, as well as learning lots of facts about how Guiding began and what our predecessor Guides had to do to become a First Class Guide! To making lanyards and sewing mascot felt mice at our Craft Weekend at Wols Cottage, Brancaster and a whole weekend of Christmas Crafts at Froggits in October. Friday nights also saw us learning the history of the Olympic Games, the Paralympics and mascots over the years, how world and Olympic records are made and registered to studying athletes who inspired the girls both in the Beijing Games and previous games, winter and summer! We all tried to learn the Olympic Hymn and put our learning of 2 verses of The National Anthem to good use when we paraded at the Burnhams Remembrance Sunday service. We were all touched by how similar the ideals of the Olympic movement are to those of The Guide Association and agreed that there are many, enjoyable ways to further a young persons talents and education outside the class room.

And of course, we began Soup lunches again! Many of you had asked were we ever going to do them again and, in adopting the Memorial Pavilion as our chosen charity for 2009, it seemed an ideal way to raise money for both them and us in a way that you and we all enjoy. If you have never been to one please come and join us for a hearty 2 course lunch for £4 at North Creake Village Hall on the first Saturday of each month (Except December for we don’t wish to clash with St Mary’s Church Fete) at 12 noon.

We are hosting Thinking Day this year on behalf of Smithdon and Brothercross District, on Sunday February 22nd and you would be very welcome to join us for a service of discovery and thanksgiving in Burnham Thorpe Church at 2-30pm.

Helen Wakeman turned 18 in October and has joined me as Assistant Guider until she goes away to University so, as part of her Adult Leadership Scheme (to become a qualified Guider) she is running the programme this term and is doing a Guide Association national challenge with the girls called ‘How Will You Change The World?’ The girls have chosen 2 charities to support and learn more about, one at home, Shelter, for homeless people with activities designed to give the girls an insight into the issues surrounding homelessness, and the other abroad, The World Wide Fund for Nature WWF. We will have a stall at each soup lunch specifically to support these causes and at the end of the year I will try to remember to tell you how much we raised for each cause. More about the activities the girls undertook in the next news letter!

Alirae Bunkle, Guide Guider - 1st South Creake Guides.