Adapting the programme for your meetings

How to continue delivering the Girlguiding programme during coronavirus

Bring the fun and adventure of our programme to girls – no matter how you’re meeting

Throughout this difficult time, we’ve been working to support our volunteers help entertain young people with new and fun activities, games and learning opportunities.

Whether your unit is returning to your usual venue, or you’re running unit meetings online, you can still keep delivering great guiding, help girls earn badges and take part in programme activities.

On our Adventures at home hub, you’ll find a whole range of games, challenges and videos that can be used in virtual meetings and socially distanced meetings or girls can also choose to do on their own.

You can also use any Girlguiding programme resources you have, such as skills builders, unit meeting activities and badge books. Some activities might need to be adapted to be used in a virtual meeting, or a meeting with social distancing.

Adapting activities - spreadsheets of suggestions

We've provided spreadsheets of adjustment ideas for lots of programme activities. They feature adjustment ideas for social distancing and virtual meetings, and will be updated with more suggestions on a regular basis.

Social distance adjustments

If you’re having a meeting in person, you’ll need to follow social distancing guidelines. This can make some guiding games and activities a little tricky. We’ve made some suggestions for how activities can be adapted so you can enjoy them and keep a safe distance between everyone.

These are suggestions only, you might want to make further adaptations based on your girls, or just because you’ve had a great idea that we didn’t think of!

Virtual meeting adjustments

Meeting online with your unit means you need to get creative with activities and find new ways to get the group working together. We’ve come up with some ideas for how activities can be adapted to help you bring the Girlguiding programme to your virtual meetings.

Remember, these are just some ideas to get your started – if you want to try something different or need to make changes to suit the girls in your unit, go ahead!

Adapted activity cards

Although our adjustment ideas spreadsheets are great starting points to adapting activities, we know that they can be a bit overwhelming, and that it can still be tricky to think of ways to adapt activities that we haven’t covered yet. That’s why we’ve annotated some of our existing activity cards to include suggested adaptations for virtual guiding. We’ve released one annotated Skills builder and unit meeting activity (UMA) per section, and they’re available for free. We hope that these will be useful to all of you who are running virtual guiding meetings at the moment, as well as great examples of how you can make similar adjustments to lots of other activities you have.

UMAs

Skills builders

Programme plans

We've created a few different kinds of programme plans for each section, to give you a hand in deciding what activities will work with the way you're meeting.

Programme plans for outdoor guiding

These four-week plans are written to be delivered outdoors. This is where instead of meeting inside you meet in an outdoor space accessible to you. This could be for an entire term or through a flexible approach mixed in with indoor and/or virtual guiding. In these plans, the unit meets for four weeks in the summer term.

Programme plans for virtual guiding or social distancing

These six-week plans include activity and programme suggestions for both virtual meetings and for socially distanced in-person meetings.

Virtual programme plans for low resources

These two-week plans include suggestions for how to deliver virtual guiding sessions with no additional resources, using only freely available content from our website.

Blended offer programme plans

These six-week programme plans are written for those units who deliver guiding flexibly. This is where you make guiding work for you and your unit. This could be through how often you meet, how long, and in what way.

Keep up to date with the latest government advice and the coronavirus guidance in your area and adapt your unit meetings accordingly.

Using programme resources

Copying and sharing activity cards

If you’re running virtual meetings, you can copy and share unit meeting activity cards and skills builder activity cards with girls and their parents or carers. You can also share any extra activity information, so they can do activities at home.

You can only share cards with members and volunteers in your own unit and if you have the original unit meeting or skills builder activity card.

If you're running in-person unit meetings, activity cards should not be shared and you will need to follow our usual guidelines on using programme materials.

Adapting activities

You might need to adjust programme activities to make them more suitable for doing at home, with limited supplies or in a virtual meeting.

If you do make any changes, make sure your updates are clearly labelled with your unit name or logo, so everyone can see who made the adaptation. Adaptations should only be used while we're not having usual unit meetings and are not for use instead of buying the activity card.

Interest badges and badge books

Information about interest badges in the badge books cannot be copied or shared directly.

If a girl in your unit has started an interest badge and wants to finish it, but doesn’t have her badge book at home, you can remind them of the remaining challenges. But you cannot directly share any badge content from the books.

If you have young members who don’t have their badge books with them at home, then they should keep a note of which activities they do to complete their interest badges so that you or their unit leader can add this to GO when they are able to meet in person.

We’ve created new badge planning sheets to help leaders and families to support girls to complete interest badges at home if they wish to do so.

We do not have online versions of our badge and award books because the books are designed as physical resources, to support girls as they work towards interest badges and awards and help them track their progress. Much of the quality of the books would be lost in a digital version.

You can buy badge books and other programme resources from the Girlguiding shop.

Share: