Saturday 25 March – A Wild Escape!

This weekend was our much-anticipated (and much delayed!) trip to the Museum of Lincolnshire Life.  For those who don’t know anything about this Museum: it is housed in a Victorian barracks built for the Royal North Lincoln Militia in 1857.  It’s rich and varied social history collection reflects and celebrates the culture of Lincolnshire and its people from 1750 to the present day.

We were met by Rachel who took us to the Learning Centre and explained what we would be doing today. We were going to pilot the Museum’s brand-new Wild Escape workshop. The aim of the Wild Escape workshop is to invite children to find a favourite animal in their local museum and create an artwork imagining its journey to a natural habitat. We were the first group to try out the new scheme too!

Our first activity was a scavenger hunt to find as many animals as possible in the Museum’s many collections, we then had to imagine that they had escaped into the wild! We returned to the Learning Centre to make a collage of our chosen escaped animal in their natural habitat. The Brownies had a wide variety of art materials to use including feathers, sparkly gems, magazines and tissue paper. We had a great time creating our masterpieces and even the leaders joined in!

Our next activity was to make our very own bug hotel by using a hammer and nails to put together a triangle of wood to make a suitable habitat for wild life in our gardens. We filled up our bug hotels with twigs, leaves and flowers. This was a terrific activity especially as none of our girls had ever used a hammer and nails before. This activity has the added bonus of covering one of our programme UMAs too – In a Fix, giving all the girls 30 minutes towards their Skills for the Future theme award.

For our last activity, we went back outside to the potting shed where we planted edible seeds: chamomile and nasturtium in decomposable pots. The pots need watering and once the seeds have sprouted, the girls can plant them (still in the pot) in their gardens to hopefully attract lots of wildlife and perhaps even make some chamomile tea!

We thanked Rachel for a brilliant morning and broke for lunch. After lunch, we visited the old Victorian school and rest of the museum. Lastly, we went outside to enjoy the sunshine and burn off some energy and took turns to visit the shop to buy souvenirs.

That’s it – what a brilliant day out.  No badge for this free trip but all deposits were returned to those who turned up.  Best Brownie of the trip will be announced at our weekly meeting.  Photos to follow soon …