By Catherine Dixon, 1st Bradley Stoke Rainbows.
Members of the 1st Bradley Stoke Rainbows have been unable to meet in person since 16th March, but this certainly hasn’t stopped them being active!
As soon as we knew that we wouldn’t be meeting in person, we moved our meetings online and adapted our activities so that the girls could continue to enjoy Rainbow activities at home with their families. The first few weeks were challenging while we all got used to this new way of meeting, but we have got used to it and look forward to seeing each other each week. Even outside these weekly virtual meetings, the Rainbows have been working hard on Rainbow activities and between them have earned over 80 badges since the lockdown began – ranging from Nature to Booklover – with the girls coming up with some great ideas to meet the requirements of the badges while staying at home.
In one of our early online meetings we decided that we were going to take on a Charity Challenge to help support a local charity during the pandemic. We voted and decided to raise money for Southmead Hospital Charity. Since then we have been walking, cycling, dancing and scooting to try and reach our fundraising target. We have now raised over £500 to support the charity’s Coronavirus Appeal. If you would like to support our fundraising efforts please donate via our fundraising page.
Saturday 6th June was our 30th birthday and we had planned to spend the day at Old Down Country Park followed by a sleepover, but due to the pandemic we moved our sleepover online instead. We set the girls and their families activities to complete throughout the day including making a birthday cake and building and sleeping in a den! As part of our celebrations we also presented Emily with her Rainbow Gold Award which is the highest award that a Rainbow can achieve and involves them completing activities and badges from each of the Girlguiding programme themes.
We hope that we will be able to meet in person again soon, but in the meantime we will continue to offer the Rainbows activities and online meetings.
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This article originally appeared in the July/August 2020 issue of the Bradley Stoke Journal magazine (on page 26). The magazine is delivered FREE, nine times a year, to ALL 8,700 homes in Bradley Stoke. Phone 01454 300 400 to enquire about advertising or leaflet insertion.
