This past year at my Service Unit’s World Thinking Day event we decided to do the event a little different. Rather than each group just creating a display for their country, we asked each group to come up with a carnival game, and SWAP from their country.

The girls each received a passport and traveled from one country to the next, playing the carnival game, learning about the country, and receiving the SWAP from that country. Most of the troops purchased their SWAP kits from MakingFriends. They have great kits already put together with supplies, making it a lot easier for girls to dig in and start making.

Carnival Games

China

My Daisy group had China, we purchased a sheet and cut circles out of the background, at the meeting before Thinking Day the girls painted the flag using their hand prints. The girls love getting messy, so when we told them they were going to make the flag of china using red paint and just their hands, jumping and screaming ensued.

Bahamas

Another troop in our council did a hula hoop contest. Each girl was timed to see how long they could hold the hula hoop up. At end we had a hula hoop stand off. A little girl, 6 years old was able to hula hoop for 4 minutes before it fell to the ground.

Other Ideas that would work for any country

Purchase a sheet, and have girls put two bulls-eyes in center. Then around the whole sheet girls can put pictures, words, facts about the country. We also had the girls make bean bags, which the game was to throw the bean bags and try to hit the center of the bulls-eye

Brownie girls each designed a cardboard piece, that had interesting facts about country. Glue a cup to top of cardboard, and have ping pong balls for girls to throw into cups, further ones worth more candy, or whatever you decide to give as prize.

After completing all the carnival games for the different countries, we played a pile of group games. With a group of 90 girls I tried to avoid team games as much as possible, because it takes a while to get them into groups, as well as keeping them in the groups, since we had a lot of younger daisy and brownies. We played games from Canada, Mexico, Germany, England, and Greece.

Canada Picture Game (NO TEAMS)

Flag, Hockey, Niagara Falls, and Maple syrup
Put pictures different areas and pull out name of item everyone at that site out and
let them mix around till one or very few left.

ENGLAND – Red Letter (NO TEAMS)

A small or large group can play. Have one person be the caller. The others stand in
a row about 30 feet away. The leader calls out a letter of the alphabet. If a player
has that letter in his name, he takes a step forward. The game ends when someone
has walked all the way to the leader; could do the first 3 people.

Germany Root Beer Chug (NO TEAMS JUST PAIRS)

Root Beer Chug: Teams of 2 – A can of root beer
First team to drink all their root beer wins

MEXICO (NO TEAMS)

Everyone write their name on tortillas with permanent marker. Girls with the furthest
toss wins. (Do one for each level have them write name and level (D, B, J, C, S, A)

GREECE – OLYMPIC TORCH RELAY RACE” (RELAY TEAMS)

Equipment needed: 4 Toilet Plungers, 4 Balls to put in plunger
Students line up in two teams with the first person from each team standing inside a
starting hoop. Give these two students a “torch”- a plunger. On the signal to begin,
the two students will run to the cone and run back. They will hand the torch to the
next student in line who will then run to the cone and back. This will continue as
above until all team members have had a turn.