The key to a good camp is THEME! A good theme ties everything together and just makes everything more fun. What this means is that you need to come up with a theme that is specific, yet broad enough that it’s easy to relate things to and doesn’t restrict you too much.

There’s no ‘right’ way to come up with a theme for camp. Sometimes inspiration just strikes you (like with Harry Potter), sometimes it’s related to something else that’s happening with your unit (we did Safari camp because I had just gotten back from spending 3 months in East Africa), and sometimes you just see one little thing and plan a camp around it. For instance, we decided to do a "Space Camp" because we saw a really neat Solar System Necklace craft in "Canadian Guider" and decided it would be a cool craft for camp, and decided to make camp fit around that.

Other themes that other groups have used successfully:

Once you’ve come up with your theme, run with it. Try and tie as much as you can to your theme. Rename your activities—for instance, call your hike a ‘space walk’ and adapt games your girls already know to fit (like changing "Streets and Alleys" into "Jungle and Savannah"). Give different parts of the campsites different names, like calling the bunkroom "the Black Hole". The more little theme-y things you add, the more fun camp is (for example, at Harry Potter Camp we painted a portrait of Lady Baden-Powell onto a plastic tablecloth, hung it from the doorway of the bunkroom and sliced it into three pieces lengthways, so that the girls had to pass through the ‘portrait hole’ to get into the ‘dorm.’)

This is just a basic checklist/overview of the things that need to be done.

-have the girls brainstorm about what kinds of things they’d like to eat at camp, and what activities they’d like to do.

-send out a kit list and permission slip (follow link to see samples, plus samples of menu and financial statement.

-discuss with your girls what goes into an emergency kit, and have everyone make their own. We like to use Kim’s Game to introduce this topic, laying all the ‘ingredients’ on a tray. After the two minutes is up, we list the things off as a group, discussing how each one is important to survival.

-get an emergency contact parent. This parent will serve as a point of contact between the campsite and the parents. If you have any emergency, you call your emergency contact and they call whoever you need, and if a parent needs to get into contact with you at camp, they call the emergency contact and the contact parent calls you. This is important, as it lets the parents contact you without having parents calling camp continuously for silly reasons and disturbing things.

-have a parent’s meeting, about a week before camp, where you inform them all of the details of camp, answer any questions they have, etc.

-if you’re up for it, you can do a "Good Camper, Bad Camper" skit to explain to the girls why the kit list contains the things it does. Basically, you have one person arrive with a nice small bag, a tidy bedroll, and all the right stuff (raincoat and boots, hat, warm clothes, good sleeping bag, flashlight, etc) and the other with several large bags and a messy bedroll and all the wrong stuff (candy, jewelry, walkman, hair dryer, sandals, hat without brim, jeans, a huge stuffed animal, huge foam mattress, etc). The campers arrive and start to set up their beds, and as they do, they discuss all the things they’ve packed, with good camper pointing out the problem with all of bad campers stuff. For instance:

Bad Camper: Look at my pretty pyjamas (holding up flowered tank top and shorts)

Good Camper: Oh, they’re really pretty, but Brown Owl said that it gets *really* cold in here at night—are you sure you’ll be warm enough?

BC: Sure! I have my sleeping bag (showing her thin bag)

GC: Gee—that looks pretty thin. You might still be cold! You can borrow my blanket if

you like. I brought it just in case, but I have my warm flannel pyjamas and my big

thick sleeping bag, so I don’t mind lending you my blanket.

And it goes on like that. Good camper is a real goody-goody, but it gets the message across and the girls love it. _

You should have your girls divided into patrols for camp, named according to theme (Asteroids, stars, moons, planets or giraffes, monkeys, zebras, elephants), and it is in these groups that the girls will do their chores. We set up a duty roster on a piece of bristol board, like this:

The four ‘duties’ are cook prep (helping the QM with whatever needs doing before the meal, including setting the table), dishes(washing dishes and any other kitchen cleanup), sweeps (sweeping dining area, bunk room, and whatever else needs sweeping) and lats (cleaning the bathrooms). Some units don’t have the girls do any chores, but it really is a good experience for them and it gets them ready for Guides, where they will most certainly have to be doing their own chores. Chores at Brownie camp are a watered-down version of Guide and Pathfinder duties, and thus provide a good introduction. For instance, we don’t make them scrub the big, nasty pots; they just wash the plates, cups and cutlery(it also introduces them to the three-basin wash system). For lats, they don’t have to scrub icky outhouses—they just wipe down the toilet seats (wearing rubber gloves), make sure there’s toilet paper, etc.

Plus—if you don’t get the girls to help out, it means you leaders have to spend all *your* time cleaning!

Planning a weekend-long camp for Brownies is really not too bad—you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to fill up the hours.

We generally have the girls arrive around 7 or 7:30, already having eaten dinner. Give them some time to choose and set up their beds, and we usually have a craft for them to do. It works well to have a craft that can be decorated, so that the girls that arrive early can spend lots of time adding details, but the girls who arrive late can just sort of slap it together and still complete the craft (for instance, at Safari camp we made toilet-paper-roll binoculars). As the girls are arriving, we also hand out their nametags. We make them out of fun-foam (for durability) and put them on a string (that way, no one has to waste time re-pinning nametags onto whatever is the top layer of clothing.

Once everyone has arrived and settled in, we go through camp rules, protocol for fire drill, etc, and then we take them around the campsite for a boundary walk.

This puts you at about 8:30pm. You can play games, do a craft, or do a theme-related activity. For Space Camp, we had guest speakers from the local Observatory to talk to us about planets, etc, and for Safari camp we worked on the World Friendship outlook badge. A fun craft to do the first night is to make placemats, in whatever form you like; they can make collages, decorate pieces of burlap, etc. You can do some night-time activities outdoors, as well, depending on the weather. A campfire is also a good plan. If the weather’s bad or it’s getting late, you can even just have a sing-song inside the cabin.

There’s really no point in planning to send your girls to bed before 10pm, regardless of what time they usually go to bed at home, because they’ll just be TOO excited about being at camp. You might as well keep them up and going—you might just be able to tire them out enough that they’ll actually sleep Friday night!

If you start them getting ready for bed around 10, you’ll probably actually have them in bed by 11, and if you’re lucky, asleep by 12. Many of them will probably be chatting, so it can often be a good idea to read a story once they’re all in bed. The longer the story, the better, because it forces them to be quiet and many of your chatty ones may very well fall asleep listening to the story.

The girls will probably be up early, but we generally plan to get started around 8am. We pull out the girls on cook prep and let the other girls have free time in the sleeping area once they’re dressed and ready, beds made, etc. Then there’s breakfast, then clean up and other duties. While the dishwashers, sweeps, and lats are doing their chores, the cook prep patrol has time to make their beds, etc, and then can have a little free time. Remember that you have to do a fire drill within the first 24 hours that you are at camp.

You have lots of activities to fill your day. Some options are:

-crafts. We like to do one big theme-related craft, plus some smaller hat crafts. At Space camp, we made Solar System necklaces, at Safari camp we batiked pillowcases, and at Harry Potter camp we decorated t-shirts. Don’t try to do the big craft in one big chuck—spread it out over two or three time-slots, so they don’t get bored. You should also plan to have a few ‘filler’ crafts on hand, for any girls who finish any craft or activity early.

-a hike. Don’t make it too long, but it’s good to get them out. About 40 minutes or so of walking is about good for Brownies.

-wide games. These are the quintessential camp activity. See the "Let’s Do It" books for possible wide games.

-some theme-related activities. At Harry Potter camp, the girls took part in ‘classes’, in a round-robin format; at Circus camp, the girls rotated through several carnival-style stations, like face-painting, learning to walk on tin-can stilts, etc.

-free time. All the girls love having 30 or 45 minutes of free time. They can play outside (within the boundaries), work on their crafts, read a book, or whatever else they like. You can also give them this time to prepare skits.

-quiet time. This involves all girls lying quietly on their bunks—they can read, or sleep, or just lie there, but they cannot talk. This another essential ‘activity’ if you want happy campers. We usually schedule it between wide games and dinner, to give the girls a bit of time to chill out and to keep them from getting cranky.

After quiet time, while you prepare dinner, you can give the girls time to practice their skits. The cook prep patrol can practice after dinner, while the others are doing their chores. You’ll want to give the girls at least some direction (a basic scenario or something) for the skits, or you’ll have two hours of crazy, plot-less, rambling (and often hilarious) skits.

We like to make Saturday dinner into a bit of a banquet, allowing the girls to dress up in theme-related costumes. To spice things up a bit, we’ll usually do something wacky, like Monk’s Dinner or Mystery Meal (see below for descriptions).

After dinner, we do skits, followed by Kangaroo Court (see below), then a full-length campfire. You can vary the length of your campfire based on how active or tired your girls are. Afterwards, you can make s’mores, banana boats, or just roast marshmallows. The girls will no doubt be WAY more tired Saturday night, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting them to bed!

Sunday morning will rush by, so don’t plan too much. After the girls get up, get them to pack up(cooks can pack up after Breakfast). It’s a good idea to plan some time to finish up any crafts. You can play more wide games, do more theme stuff, or just give them some free time. Then it’s time to finish packing and cleaning up, do a short Guide’s Own (closing ceremony), and then parents arrive.

If you plan to have parents pick up after lunch, have everyone prepare bag lunches right after breakfast, so that you don’t have to be messing around in the kitchen just before camp ends.

All that said, you can plan your camp schedule any way you’d like. There are no real rules to program, so you can be as creative as you like! Plus, you should always be prepared to be VERY flexible about your schedule. When we write up a schedule, we use it only as a guideline–you will soon see that things never take the amount of time you had planned for them. Sometimes an activity just isn’t working and you have to scrap it at the last minute, sometimes a craft takes longer than you thought, and sometimes you’re just having too much fun doing something and you just don’t want to stop. Whatever the case, just go with the flow. If you and the girls are having fun, don’t worry about following your nicely typed-up schedule of events. It’s pretty much guaranteed that by an hour or two after breakfast, you will already by off-schedule, but just remind yourself that it really doesn’t matter!! Just enjoy camp!

This is probably one of our girls’ favorite parts of camp. Those who have gone to summer camp may have already experienced ‘Kangaroo Court’, but I’ll explain for those who have never heard of it (or who have forgotten _ ). Basically, in KC you are tried for silly ‘crimes’ and sentenced to funny ‘punishments’.

Possible crimes can be:

-giggling and talking all night long

-continuously losing something

-spilling something at a meal

-having a really messy bunk

-asking too many questions

_basically, anything silly or goofy that the girls laughed at (but nothing that anyone was embarrassed by).

Punishments include

-rolling a peeled banana across the floor with your nose

-raw egg toss (girls toss raw eggs back and forth between partners)

-water transfer (girls hold bowl on head and try to fill bowl as quickly as possible using water in the bucket in front of them and the cup in their hand, without soaking themselves)

-hidden treasure (without using their hands, girls must find the candy at the bottom of a bowl of yogurt/pudding)

-cake eat (without using hands, girls must eat cupcake/muffin covered in icing/jam)

-yogurt feed (in partners—both partners are blindfolded and must feed each other yogurt/pudding at same time)

-banana peel (peel a banana without using your hands)

Break the girls up into about four groups, grouping together girls with similar crimes. Four is a pretty good number, because it provides enough ‘punishments’ for the girls’ enjoyment but doesn’t drag on too long.

Kangaroo court works best if the leaders pretend to be stern and serious—they get a bigger kick out of it that way. Make it really over the top (or as over-the-top as you’re comfortable with _ )

We start things off by informing them that before we can get on to [campfire, skits, etc.], there are some serious matters to attend to. Camp isn’t just fun and games, and there have been some pretty serious crimes committed at camp. What happens when someone commits a crime? They must be punished. Then read out the first crimes and the girls who are charged with these crimes, and then bring them up and complete the punishment. Next, read out the second crime and give out the second punishment¼Once you’ve proceeded through all the groups, the girls will LOVE it if you punish each other. Charge each other with crimes like getting names mixed up or taking a wrong turn on the hike or anything silly. It’s our girls’ favorite part to see their Owls peeling bananas with their toes!

This is another traditional camp ‘thing’. Basically, the goal is to eat your entire meal in silence. When I went to summer camp, we did this eating with forks and knives and it was fun, but the Guide camp version is WAY more entertaining. Collect a whole bunch of kitchen utensils (spatulas, pastry mashers, whisks, ladles, etc.) and put them in a garbage bag, and then have each girl draw a utensil out of the bag. She must then eat her meal (generally, pasta and salad) using her funky utensils and without making a sound (no talking, laughing, etc.). Anyone who does make a sound must give up their utensil and eat with her hands. If she talks again, she loses the use of her hands and must eat with her face. Once she’s eating with her face, a girl is allowed to speak and can try and make other people laugh.

This is another option for your Saturday night dinner. For this dinner, you present the girls a menu of foreign words, and they have to choose which items they want for their appetizer, main course and dessert. As such, it fits in well with any theme that involves another language. For Space camp, we used a made-up ‘alien’ language, so the menu looked something like this:

1. Snarflung (fork)

2. Blarklak (knife)

3. Gneglim (spoon)

You give each item for your meal (fork, knife, spoon, drink, napkin, plus food like salad, pasta, garlic bread and pudding) a number and a name in whatever language fits with your theme. Give each girl a card that looks like this (below) and get them to put a number in each spot.

Appetizer ___ ___ ___

Main Course ___ ___ ___ ___ ___

Dessert ___ ___

Basically, they have NO idea what it is they’re choosing for any part of the meal, so they might end up with pudding, juice and pasta for their appetizer, but no cutlery, etc. If they don’t have any utensils, then they have to eat with their hands.

Serving this meal takes a fair bit of running-around during the meal, because each girl has a different menu, but it was worth the trouble. The girls just loved it. To make things easier, assign girls to a particular adult, so that each adult is responsible for four or five girls’ menus. That way, you avoid mix-ups like skipping certain girls, etc.

A fun thing to do one morning at camp is to have a jello tree. Make the jello according to package directions and then place in baggies (and secure with ribbon) to set. You need one bag per girl, plus a few extras, and the greater the variety of colours you have, the better. If it gets quite cold where you’re camping, you can put the baggies of jello out the night before, to set outside. If you’re not sure if it gets cold enough, put the baggies in muffin tins and let them set overnight in the fridge. Select a tree with low branches that is close to your site (if you can see it from the cabin windows, that’s good, but try not to have it TOO visible from the sleeping area—you don’t want the Brownies to see it before it’s time), and hang the baggies from the branches. After breakfast, make up a reason for everyone to look out the window ("Oh, look—a deer!" works well _ ) and then everyone can go outside and taste the fruit of this magical tree. It’s the most fun if you bite off one of the corners of the baggie and suck the jello out of the bag.

You can also do a jello tree at another time of the day, if you like, but don’t leave the jello hanging too long in warm weather, because it will de-solidify and you’ll just have bags of coloured sugar-water hanging from the tree, and it gets all over EVERYTHING when the girls try and eat it.

Box ovens are a relatively easy way to introduce Brownies to the joys of outdoor cooking. We find that this is a great way to get your 2^nd years excited about Guides, and it’s just plain fun!

Basically, a box oven is a cardboard box (liquor store size works well) lined with several layers of aluminum foil. You place charcoal briquettes, in an aluminum pie plate, on the bottom of the box, and place your food on a rack in the box, and voila—box oven. You can cook mini pizzas (using english muffins as crust), bake a cake in a tuna tin, heat up sub sandwiches, and more. If you’ve never used box ovens before, get someone in your district to teach you (Senior Branches are great for this kind of thing).