6-week Rainbow Socially Distanced Term Plan

As we approach moving back to face to face guiding, we’ve had a go at putting one of our challenge badges in to a term plan, alongside activities from the programme to ensure girls are still working towards programme badges.

This is a six week princess themed term plan enabling girls to complete the Lead Stage 1 Skills Builder, 2 Skills for my future UMAs and part 1 of their Drawing badge to get them started, all while having some princess themed fun.

If you would like to use this and buy the Princess Fun badges too; take a look here to order them.

Easter Activities

When we first moved on to Zoom in 2020 for virtual guiding we had to change our end of term celebration evening to an online session. We actually ended up running throughout the Easter holidays and had this Easter themed evening one week.

We started by getting them to find things at home to spell out EASTER – they used building bricks, toy cars, clothes and so much more.

After this we had a go at singing… we know the lag causes some problems but it was fun and they joined in more with the actions than the singing. But the words were on the screen so they could join in if they wanted to.

Our final activity was to get them to create a mascot using things they had at home loo roll tubes, an egg or other random craft things – but we didn’t want them to buy anything for it so that it was kept as cheap as possible. But it was great fun. We’ll be looking to something similar for this Easter, and will share once we’ve finished planning.

How to: Paint the Past on Zoom

We loved running Paint the Past on Zoom – it was one of the first activities we did on Zoom and worked really well. Find out how we delivered this.

We started off simple -asked girls to have pens and paper ready (this is the most common resource we use on zoom).

We kicked off by sharing a cave painting – we asked them what they could see in the picture. We used the mute all and asked girls to put their hands up if they had something. We then asked the girl to unmute to share her answer. It’s great to teach the girls where the mute/unmute button is as it can be hard to hear if they are all chatting away or have noise in the background.

We then shared our summary slide – yes, they show different stories from the past, of catching food or making clothes and they help us remember what the past was like. We then shared another picture and got them to tell us what they could see this time, and what they thought was different.

It was the leaders turn, we used the annotate function in Zoom to draw on the screen. I started drawing a picture of some traffic lights, and some little red people (rainbows). The girls then had to guess what I was drawing a picture of. They found it really easy to guess, but you could make this more difficult as needed for your own girls.

It gave them an example of how a cave painting might look a little different today to the past. We set them the challenge to draw their own cave painting representing their favourite Rainbow game we play. They then held them up and talked about what game they played. If we were doing it again, we’d try to play some of them. For example we could give Traffic lights a go virtually, we just keep going and going until they are tired!!

As an extension: You could play a game of Pictionary on the whiteboard and get everyone to join in. Or split the whiteboard into sections and get each girl to draw part of a rainbow meeting… the songs, games, activities, getting badges 😀

Have you already had a go at this activity? Have you got a different way you could share?

Pizza Time

We went a little off of our term plan this week and decided to have our Pizza Party. The girls were very excited.

Basic ingredients list of pizza base or a wrap, tomato puree or chocolate spread and toppings of your choice.

We started the meeting as usual with our opening song and the girls all saying hello to each other. It’s so lovely as they aren’t seeing their friends at school so they’re very excited to see everyone.

Then we got cracking. We popped the instructions on screen and the girls got making. We had dinner pizzas and dessert pizzas. Free choice, after all, it’s all about the fact we’re different.

While the savoury pizzas cooked we had a go at some topsy turvy art too. They coloured in their pizza before drawing the outline. Some girls found it really easy while others thought it was a bit harder, but they had some great pictures.

When pizzas were cooked they sat down together to tuck in, no-one really spoke, but they showed us what they had on their pizza and how yummy it was. Once we were done eating we had a couple of treasure hunts around our house. Starting with ‘something that makes you happy’ – we had everything from pets, to toys, to mums and dads and grandparents, and some siblings tucked in too. Our other hunts were something with hands (and it couldn’t be a person) and something with wheels. The girls love to find things around the house to show us, and whenever they have the same toy as someone else they get very excited 😀

A ‘healthy’ pizza
A ‘Rainbow’ pizza because I love Rainbows 😀
Even though I’m not a fan of zoom… I want to join in.
My Sweetie Surprise

We had so much fun… we hope you do too!!

Live Smart 1

For our face to face sessions we’d normally use a mixture of real coins and play coins to complete the Marvellous Money activity, alongside Fruit Shop UMA. Our favourite play coins are linked at the bottom for anyone interested in them.

For the virtual arena we asked girls to have one of each coin, 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1 and £2. We then asked them to look at them, order them in value and take some rubbings of them. We then shared some pictures of some different toys with a cost for them. They had to use their coins to work out which ones they’d use to buy it. They could only use each coin once for the item.

For Catwalk Craze we made our own Bingo game, girls had to write down 9 different places from a list including Rainbows, School, Woodland Walk, Beach, Swimming pool, dance, football and more. We then showed them an item of clothing on the screen and they had to tick off one place that they would wear it. They could only tick off one place each time, so although they might wear a vest to School or for a woodland walk they could choose one.

For Stick it, fix it we had a couple of options for our virtual arena; we shared some pictures of broken things and they had to match up with how they could fix it. If they had a cardboard box and a plastic bottle we got them to do these themselves, parents popped a hole in them and the girls had to use things they had at home to fix them.


Our favourite resources for these activities when in-person. These are affiliate links so the Rainbow unit makes a little bit of money if you buy the item from this link:

Rainbow coloured duck tape: https://amzn.to/3o7NcXt

Play money: https://amzn.to/2Mc7nX5

Animal Fun Sleepover

We’re going to be hosting an animal themed sleepover from 6 to 7 March. We should have been heading away for the weekend to our local campsite, but with that not looking likely we’ll be having our sleepover virtually. As some girls have already earned their Animal Fun badge everyone will get their Virtual sleepover badge, and anyone who hasn’t yet got an Animal Fun badge can get one of those.

For our sleepover we’ll meet live on Zoom for a few sessions where we’ll all do an activity together. Then the girls and parents can choose from the pack linked below which other activities they might like to do during the two days. It’s free to families (other than buying the resources for any activities) and they’ll all get at least one badge for attending.

Do you fancy hosting a sleepover? Feel free to join in with some animal fun, you can send out the pack to parents, or select the activities and you could charge them for a pack that includes the instructions, resources and their badge.

We’d love to hear about any other Animal Fun sleepovers – share what you’ve been up to with us on Twitter or Facebook and use the hashtag #AnimalFunSleepover

We hope to see lots of you joining in the fun.

The first week back

As a unit we’ve been really lucky to be able to have some in-person meetings from September to December (apart from the November lockdown) and these were great fun.

With the news of lockdown 3 we’ve reverted to zoom as we want to ensure the girls can keep guiding and having fun (and the leaders too).

This week we started simple – we found out about what they got up to since we last saw them and if they were good enough for Father Christmas to visit… and then we played lots of games. Our favourite games this week were drawing on our head. You pop the piece of paper on top of your head and have a go at drawing something.

Here’s Cloudy’s attempts at an Elephant and a Giraffe.

We played lots of other games and did some other drawing activities.

The girls love creating – so a quick 5 minute drawing filler is always great to have in our back pocket. Why not try popping 50 dots on a piece of paper (anywhere you like no order) and then connecting the dots to make some pictures, just like dot to dot you shouldn’t lift your pen off of the paper – it’s hard but super fun!!

Next week we’re going to start on a Skills Builder and we’ve got some really fun things planned for this term, including making Pizza and more.

Animal Fun…

Our girls love animals, and Covid has been a blessing for enabling us to have their Pets to meetings. They love making too, so when we heard we’d allowed to have outdoor meetings we used the opportunity to head to our local campsite and have an animal themed day. We got to make our own animal homes, go tracking, look for signs of animals and do a couple of crafts too 🙂

To celebrate, the girls had the chance to go home with both a PawPrint badge and also our Animal Fun badge!!

We loved the activities – and maybe you will too? Suitable for online guiding as well as in-person!! Grab the pack here and the badges here