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Star (Christchurch), Issue 18960, 6 January 1930, Page 12

Work With Girl Guides. Miss Dalton, a Diploma-ed Guider from England, who has been “ lent" to the Wellington Provincial Girl Guide Headquarters for a year, is now nearly at the end of her stay in New Zealand, and will return Home in March next. Her work for the Guide movement in the Wellington province has been to increase public interest by speaking before Rotary Clubs and other organisations, and by holding training classes for guiders. Miss Dalton thinks that amazing progress has been made by Girl Guides in New Zealand during the five years of their existence, and expects that the movement will spread a great deal further, but apart from a possible superiority in physique she has not noticed any marked difference between the Brownies and Guides of New Zealand and those of the Old Country. “Of course, the New Zealand children are more used to camping,” she said to a “ Post ” reporter, “ and so it is not so hard to get parents to consent to their joining Guide camps. It is perhaps not generally known that a guider has to pass a fairly stiff test before she is allowed to take charge of a camp: she can’t, as it were, take a handful of children and start a camp for them in the next field. The whole is properly organised, and supervised.” The part of her work which Miss Dalton likes best is that done in the training classes, when new ideas for games, dances, and so on are v/orked out. It has been possible, too, to get in a certain amount of hiking and outdoor cooking. Last year a resident recruit training week, followed by a week’s refresher course for guiders. was held at Nga Tawa School, Marton, and a similar fortnight was spent at Chilton House School, Island Bay. As always, more “ grown-ups ” are needed in the guide movement, for while there are a great many children ready to join up, naturally an unlimited number cannot be enrolled unless there are trained, older people to supervise their doings. The recruit work, therefore, is one way in which people interested in guiding may see for themselves just what work it entails before they definitely decide to join. If they feel thoroughly interested—and by the end of the week most of them do—they give an affirmative answer, and if they decide against it, well, “no offence taken” is the official attitude. Although since their inauguration guides in New Zealand have been visited by Lady Marjorie Dalrymple, Miss Behrens, and Miss Wilson, .all enthusiasts from Great Britain, Miss Dalton is the first guider to be attached to anv provincial headquarters. In spite of her work, she has found time to investigate the methods of kindergartens and schools, being interested in the devious ways of education in the Dominion, but naturally she has not had much opportunity for sight-see-ing. In February, however, she hopes, with car ad tent, to learn something of Rotorua and the South Island.