5th Ashford Brownies celebrate their 50th birthday!

According to GO, the first meeting date was 1 June 1970. We had always wanted to do something to mark our 50th anniversary and were thinking about maybe having an afternoon tea party, and inviting old members along. Obviously, this was no longer possible, so as we were already running virtual meetings via Zoom, I looked for something we could do online to celebrate.


I created a PowerPoint with slides showing the uniform, Promise Badges, Badges and handbooks from each decade from 1970-2020, which I shared over the Zoom call. After talking through each slide, we did a quiz using the annotate function. There was a picture for each question and the girls had to put a mark next to the correct decade it was from - some were a little over-enthusiastic with their drawing and we had to use the 'clear all drawings' function quite a lot, but they enjoyed the quiz!


Then we did the Brownie Pocket Challenge UMA, starting with a scavenger hunt for the girls to find the items from around their houses, and then splitting into smaller groups to discuss the solutions to the scenarios. The girls were very inventive with the items! They discussed what things would be good to carry in their pockets today, and whilst things like tissues and plasters were the same, they also included a phone, hand sanitizer, face mask, and anti-bac wipes!


To finish, we invited any Mum's who were Brownies to sit with their daughters while we did a 'Guess the Interest Badge' quiz - The Hostess badge brought back a lot of memories - but no one remembered that the badge with a spiders web on it was for Craft?! Finally, we ended the meeting by getting the girls to light a candle on a cake and sing 'Happy Birthday to 5th Ashford Brownies!'


It wasn't quite the celebration we had originally envisaged, but all the Brownies had a good time, learnt how Brownies has changed in the last 50 years, and got to eat cake, so it was worth it! We are still hoping to be able to have a big celebration at some point....maybe for our 51st Anniversary instead!