| Healthy Lifestyles - Mental Health Friendship |
| Sandra's guide pages |
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| Recipe for a Friend Get girls into groups and give them each a copy of this list: |
| always listens buys me presents remembers my birthday enjoys the same music cheers me up when I’m miserable spends all her time with me doesn’t have any other friends watches the same tv programmes knows all the “in” crowd |
| has a sense of humour helps me with my homework let me copy her homework will lend me anything of hers likes the same things I do lives near me laughs at my jokes likes my other friends will always tell me other peoples’ secrets |
| Then ask them to cross out any things they don’t want in a friend and number the others in order of importance. This may be best done in peer groups as these things will change a lot through the guide (or brownie) age range. Make sure you emphasise that there is not necessarily a "right" answer. |
| Forever Friends Quiz Try the one on GuidingUK with brownies or younger guides |
| Respecting others Divide your group into two. Take one half aside and give them paper and a pencil. Tell them they are to have conversation, or interact with 10 people in the other group in an allotted time. Everyone in the other half gets a sign (which I made from construction paper and with a yarn "necklace" to place it over the head.) No-one is able to read their own sign so they don't know what it says. Make up signs like "Tell me I look tired", "Ignore me", "Tell me I look great", "Call me stupid", "Treat me like your best friend" etc. There should be a variety of positive and negative signs. ONLY the group with pencil and paper can initiate a conversation. The group with signs must wait for someone to talk to them. It helps if they can slip the comment into the conversation. (eg. A friend of mine was wearing the "Call me stupid" sign at the workshop. Someone came up to her and asked her where she was from. When she said, Cardigan, they replied, "I hear there are a lot of stupid people living in Cardigan"!) I have to admit, if I KNEW there was someone with shaky self esteem or very shy, I would tend to "plant" them with a positive sign. So I might ask someone who knew the group well, if I didn't. After the group "interacts" it is important to debrief what happened, talking about how people treated them, how it made them feel, how they felt if they had a negative sign and why, who had the advantages and why. It is also important with an exercise like this that everyone know the game ends when the game is over, and should not be used to joke over a weekend, etc. I used the exercise in a discussion of stereotypes. We all have invisible signs which we wear and which affect the way people treat us. We need to examine our reactions to the way we are treated because they can also add to the way we are treated in future. [posted to WAGGGS-L a while back, sorry I've lost the name of the poster] |