Friday, February 3, 2012

Thinking Day Prep!

Our service unit does a big "fair" for Thinking Day. It's really something else. All of the troops are assigned a country and get to do a display/booth about it. We were assigned Greece.



During meeting 13, we tried a variety of foods that we planned out. We strategically placed some of those Greek foods in there so that the girls could choose what we would make for it. In the end, they choose the souvlaki. So for our food tasting, we will have the souvlaki with tsaziki and baklava at our table.

The next part to Thinking Day will be the passports. When each girl arrives, they will be given a passport to collect stamps at each booth. Let me just tell you now how hard it is to find a Greek stamp! The closest I could find was a set of travel stamps that had the Parthenon on it, but I was not about to spend $30 on the set of 8! Thankfully, Cricut had a sale directly on their website. They had several cartridges that were perfect! The Destinations cartridge was one of them, and at the time, I was able to snag it for $20. The cartridge has SO many locations on it, and is something I can use for future Thinking Days. We printed out their Parthenon with one of the labels that said Greece, and mounted it like a sticker to use for the passports.

Next up was the SWAPS. If you have never been to the site Making Friends, then you don't know what you are missing! It is scout central and SO much more. They had several great ideas on what we could do for our SWAPS, including print outs for miniature post cards! One piece of advice- before you buy anything from their site, price shop. We found a few things that Hobby Lobby had for cheaper, but other thing that Making Friends price just could not be beat.  We shopped around got our pins and beads from various spots.

The next step is the costumes. We are not required to wear costumes, but we are required to have at least two girls in costume to represent our troop in the parade of countries. I was honestly overwhelmed when I did research on what we could do for costumes. There was the obvious, a toga, which can easily be done with an old sheet. The next thing that popped into my head was the Balkan Dancers (though at first I could not remember what they were called, so I Googled "Greek dancers"). It's easy to do a simple version of that costume- peasant shirt (or white, long sleeved shirt), red vest, black skirt, and some of those cute socks that make your legs looked like their laced up (which most little girls LOVE), or something similar, along the same lines (just look up the photos, the costumes vary, but have the same basis). I thought that we should give them one more option, just in case, and the thing that kept coming back to my mind was the Olympics. After all, Greece is the birthplace of the Olympics. I'm not talking about Spartacus era costumes though, I'm thinking more along the lines of sports. Not everyone is about to run out and get an equestrian outfit or wet suit, so for our kids, it was easier to give them the option of dressing up like someone from their favorite sport. Some of them already have soccer and softball uniforms, so it's very easy for them.

Our next component is our display, which we will be working with our girls on. There's a lot of information to put out on Greece as you can see from all of the above. They will be narrowing it down during our meeting.  By letting them pick and choose what to put on display, it will give them a chance to learn more about Greece.

The last component to our preparations will be the paper dolls.  Along with the passports, each girl will be receiving paper dolls.  We are then supposed to provide some sort of an outfit that represents our country.  Making Friends has a lot of outfits, but nothing that we can truly use to represent Greece (that might make sense to most of the girls there).  They do have a few sporty outfits, but once they take those home, I feared that they might not make that connection.  I printed out one of the dolls and a few outfits and drew up our own toga for the dolls.
It's a little rough, but it fits the doll, and unlike many of the other print outs, it has those handy dandy tabs that most paper doll clothing has.  

After everything I have printed out, I am almost certain the printer and my Cricut hate me right now, so they will be getting a much needed break for a few weeks.  

4 comments:

  1. Wow! Your thinking day has a lot to it. I'm a 2nd year Daisy Leader (I have 4 Kindergartners and 4 1st graders). This is the first year we are participating in the SU Thinking Day. All I was told was to make a display representing the country and bring some kind of dish. I even got to pick out the country. We chose Canada since we have Girl Guide penpals from there.

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  2. I can see how it might seem like a lot, but in all actuallity, we haven't spent a lot of time on everything. Obviously, putting together our SWAPs and stamps/stickers took the longest, but everything else was a breeze for us.

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  3. Our thinking day is in 3 weeks and I'm getting a little nervous...We barely have anything started!! We'll see how it goes. Our whole unit is brand new so we have no idea what to expect.

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    1. 3 weeks is more than enough time, you'll be fine!!

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