Last night we trialled our very first virtual Rainbow meeting… It went well, and the 16 girls that joined seemed to enjoy themselves too. So how did it work, what did we do and what have we learned?
Our plan of attack – we used Zoom, Cloudy has actually paid for the monthly contract as this means we can go over 40 minutes and not need to worry about getting things through in the time. We’re also using the account for 3 Rainbow units and a Guide unit, so we’ll keep you updated on how it holds up.
What did we do – we started our meeting like all others with our opening song; to say it was a bit disjointed was an understatement, and maybe next week we’ll trial singing a line and repeating it back to see if that is better.
We then moved on to our main activities, luckily two activities we had planned for the evening already didn’t require any equipment and could be adapted for the virtual environment. We started with Stretch It Out, Cloudy read through the story and the girls chose the actions. We used the names of girls who had joined our meeting to keep them engaged. We then had a go altogether with Cloudy just reading and them acting out the actions. We did a brief discussion (maybe popped the girls on mute a little) to talk about when we’re planning to be in the spotlight and do lots of moving we need to warm up first, great timing as we did warm-ups for Astronaut Academy last week 🙂
Our second activity was Let’s Go, some of the girls had siblings join in with them, or utilised mums and dads and whoever else was around. This is a great activity… all about mime… so you’d expect no noise (hahahahaha) We had a go at the ideas suggested and then we took it in turns to all create our own and the other Rainbows had to guess what they were miming.
Next we used the whiteboard function to see if it would work, it didn’t for everyone, but did for some, I think next week we’ll have that on so girls can play before we get started, but here’s our drawing from last night.
Finally we had a discussion, I popped all Rainbows on mute for this, about themes and activity ideas for our Division Camp planned for July 2021. They put their hand up if they wanted to speak and we un-muted them one at a time so we could hear the girls. Loads of awesome ideas came out of the meeting too.
Before we said goodbye, we did our closing song, again somewhat disjointed but great to keep the normality.
So what did we learn; the singing was somewhat disjointed but great to keep the normality for the girls. Some of the girls were a little nervous to start with but I think most of them found their feet during the meeting; and we’re definitely going to try again next week but we’ll have some more practical activities they can do and then hold up to the screen for us to see… We’ll be trialling paint the past next week and hopefully they’ll also reenact the queen’s coronation too for ‘A Royal Engagement’.
Feedback from the parents has been super positive, so for the foreseeable, 4th North Heath Rainbows will be meeting on Zoom each week and continuing almost as normal.
We hope this is useful for anyone who is looking to consider virtual meetings, feel free to drop us a message if you’d like some more information or support.