The Edible Campfire
Here is a great little exercise for practising campfire-building with your Guide Unit, submitted to the Guiding Mailing List by Angela Dale.
To learn to fire building indoors, make an edible fire! You can have a party and go over the procedures for laying a safe fire all at the same tine. You will need: napkins, paper cups to fill with water, candy corn or cheerios, shredded coconut, pretzels, cheezies, cinnamon hearts (red hots), and one toothpick/girl.
Each girl should unfold her napkin and lay it nice and smooth to represent the clearing that has to be done in an area to make it safe to build a fire. Here you may go into as much detail as you feel your girls are ready for. Discuss safe places to build fires Then make a fire ring of cheerios. Again you may pause and talk about safety. Next you make three piles of firewood: coconut for the tinder, pretzels for the kindling and cheezies for logs. Before you lay the fire you need a cup of water to represent the fire fighting equipment that should be on hand.
Now you are ready to lay your fire: Lay an A or V of logs after you decide what direction the wind is blowing. Lay your tinder against the crossbar of the A or in the cross of V. As each girl is ready, she gets a toothpick for a match to hold in under the largest pile of tinder and you drop a few red hots on top to show that the fire is burning brightly, using just one match! Then she places on more kindling and logs as the fire burns brighter. After her fire has been approved by the leader she eats it all!!
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