Cooking blinis using recycled cans

Reducing, Re-using and Recycling can be fun!  Check out the photo showing how we cooked Russian blinis using recycled cans brought in from home.  Each of us had a chance of cooking our mini pancakes, a yummy afternoon tea!  Whilst some of us were cooking with Wootoo and Kinta, the rest of us were playing our games "without power or stuff" with our regular parent helper Paula and Jen's mum Jo, who was helping out with Thinking Day.

Games we love to play whilst saving our planet!

In groups, we discussed things we play with everyday and found that much of our play time needed energy stored in batteries or electricity.  Thinking about this, we came up with a bunch of games we can play which don't have a toll on our environment:

Entertainment without power or stuff:

1. Hide n seek
2. Tiggy
3. Hand games (e.g. thumb wars)
4. Stuck in the mud
5. Red Rover
6. Piggy in the middle
7. Heads down thumbs up
8. Duck, duck, goose
9. Leap frog
10. Chinese whispers
11. Charades
12. 44 home
13. The story game
14. Role playing
15. Clapping games
16. Fruit Salad
17. Eye spy
18. Soccer (with a pine cone)
19. Hop Scotch (made from sticks and stones)
20. Rainbow spotting

Nude Food!

  

Through our Thinking Day activities, we have found that reducing, reusing and recycling are all worthwhile!  One way we can reduce the amount of packaging we waste is to change the way we pack our lunches.  Together we discussed using lunch boxes, wax paper, ice bricks and insulated lunch bags to carry our lunch to school each day.  We can save help save our planet whilst saving money and eating more healthily!

Wootoo challenged all Guides to aim to have two nude food lunch days a week.

Try the interactive game allowing you to virtually pack their lunch and weigh up both how healthy lunch is and the impact of the waste packaging on the environment.  

http://www.nudefoodday.com.au/schools/interactive-activities.php

Reduce…the use of fossil fuels when getting around

Reduce…the use of fossil fuels when getting around.

In this activity for Thinking Day, we grouped into our patrols. 

The Dolphins discussed low fossil fuel transportation and made posters (above left) showing their ideas which included: bikes, pogosticks, walking, scooters, skipping, horses, wheelchairs and running.   (How much fun would it be going to school using a pogo stick – or a horse!)

The Junior Guides investigated using muscle power (above right) and their ideas included:  gardening by hand, recycling, making your own things out of things you don’t need anymore and sweeping.

The Senior Guides completed a “Break it down” activity looking at the resources it takes to make a common object – a pencil.  A pencil is made from graphite, softwoods and cedar, paint, rubber and aluminium.  (Some have a plastic decorative coating too.)  The resources which make up a pencil can be transported from around the world including: Graphite, Brazil/Mexico; wood, Sweden/South Africa; paint, Estonia; Rubber, Thailand/Malaysia, Aluminium, China/Mozambique.

All of these resources, plus the energy used to transport them around the world, for something we take for granted.  The example of the pencil helped us pause and think more about our choices and how what we use and how we use it can effect our earth’s resources.

Challenge:  Share the “Break it down” activity of the Senior Guides at:

http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/activity/geography-of-a-pencil/?ar_a=2

Switch it Off, Green it Up!

Save...resources in and around your home.

Working together, we investigated our ecological footprint.  We learnt that our ecological footprint is a measure of the amount of cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fibre and timber we use and need to absorb the wastes we create.  In Australia, we're consuming more than three times our fair share of the planet's natural resources, and that it would take three Earth's to maintain our current resource use!  We estimated our own ecological footprint using handouts and found our lowest was 16 and highest 48, with most scoring around 26.  We discussed ways we could reduce our impact on our Earth's resources by making better choices, reducing, reusing and recycling in our everyday lives.
Challenge:  Ask your family to try the ecological footprint calculator and discuss ways you can Save Our Planet! as part of thinking day.

http://www.wwf.org.au/our_work/people_and_the_environment/human_footprint/footprint_calculator

What I love about our planet...

To begin our preparation for World Thinking Day, "we can save our planet" we reflected on what we each love about our planet.

"We love the animals, trees, flowers, sunset, breeze, waterfalls, birds, rain and thunder." - Kookaburra Patrol

"We love the sunset, Michael Jackson, horses and cats." - Dolphin Patrol

"We love water to swim in and anything to do with animals.  We also love colour because it would be pretty boring just black and white."  "We love Justen Bieber, fun things to do, my two dogs and my mum and dad". - Lyrebird Patrol

Check out the video "The World is Where We Live" by the WorldWildlife Organisation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpS8oLLy51Q&feature=email

Thinking Day 2012

Each year on February 22, World Thinking Day, girls participate in activities and projects with global themes to honor their sister Girl Guides and Girl Scouts in nearly 150 countries world wide. 


Our theme for World Thinking Day 2012 is "we can save our planet".  Over the next few weeks we are working together with Wootoo and Kinta to learn more about how our everyday decisions effect our planet, and how we can make choices to help save our planets resources.

Welcome to Karana Downs Girl Guides 2012, Parents Guide to using this blog...

Welcome to Karana Downs Girl Guides 2012!

In support of our Thinking Day activities, we have developed this blog to allow all guides to add their ideas.

Your child can add their thoughts directly to the blog, or you can email their ideas to: kdgguides@gmail.com and we'll get them up on the blog as soon as we can.

If your child is posting their ideas directly to the blog, remember you first need to create a gmail account which you can do through the google homepage.  Whilst our blog is for our use only, it is within a public space, so the usual privacy rules prevail.

When creating a gmail account and posting to our blog we ask you to supervise your children, and ensure you protect your privacy through use of a nickname for example:  Kookaburra, Platypus, Echidna etc. Don't forget to keep your password somewhere safe for future use.   Please do not post photo's which contain children's faces.