Step 1: The aMAZE Journey

Following the steps of the Pyramid, our first stop is the aMAZE Journey. 

"Twists and turns, dead-ends and u-turns, everyday is a maze of possibilities. In the maze of life, you encounter everything that's fun and confusing and funny and difficult about finding your way... A maze can represent all of life, or just one important experience...mazes mean possibilities- so go ahead, choose a path" ~ aMAZE. 

The aMaze journey focused around one simple, yet incredibly complex thing... life, love, and your relationship with your friends.  Everyday of your life is a maze, with countless options, countless possibilities, and countless possible mistakes.  Some days, you might reach the end, and others, you might wander around a bit before getting to where you want to go.  The aMAZE book helps you confront and conquer relationship issues, and informs you on how to prevent them in the first place. Acceptance of each other's faults is one of the most important skills in life, and we learned this in aMAZE.  This journey helped us choose our Silver Award theme... Promote peace and understanding to everyone! 

~Troop 60435

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The above activity is called "What Really Matters."  This was my favorite activity out of the whole aMAZE book! In "What Really Matters," you had to check off the qualities that you believed mattered when choosing your friends. An excerpt from the list: Does intelligence matter when choosing your friends?  How about race? And is your friend fun to be with? If you said that the first two questions didn't matter when choosing friends, and the last one did, you're on the right track! This activity promotes understanding and acceptance. Sometimes, the best friends you'll ever have may be from different backgrounds than you are. They may not be as smart as you are. Everyone deserves the right to be accepted, though. This activity teaches us to judge people by their personalities, not by their physical characteristics.

~Margaret

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This activity shows you some types of bullies and their actions. When people think of a bully, they usually picture someone who is stealing lunch money. But bullying behavior incluses gossiping, excluding, manipulating, and even name-calling. When I completed the first activity on this page, I chose the girl with her hand raised to her mouth as a bully, whispering to someone, because I knew that gossiping and spreading rumors is bullying. I also thought that to choose the girl with her fists raised would be stereotypical. But really, any of those girls could be a bully. Still, you can never truly tell a bully based on how she looks. A person isn't always a bully, they may only act like a bully sometimes. Everyone acts like a bully at one time or another. Another reason I chose this page was because of the quote at the top: We must reject the view that to be a victor, you must have a victim; to stand tall, you must stand on someone. --Harriet Woods This quote is so true. As a whole, this activity gave me a wider understanding of the behavior of bullies.
~Jillian

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This last activity shows how a witness to bullying really can do something about it. Then, to test your skills, you can pick out the bully, victim, and witness in the "Locker Room Chatter" story. There were four more of these stories, so you can comment for more! This was my favorite activity in the book because I didn't know a witness could be avoiding standing up for so many different reasons! You can see a few types of witnesses in the green box on the first page. Also, in my opinion, the identifying activity was really fun. The aMAZE journey in general was a fun and involved way to learn about non-bullying, or pro-peace, unlike in most schools where they take you to assemblies and somebody does a monologue and a handful of students get involved. Along with the book, my troop did a peacemaker kit. Our peacemaker kits were little boxes full of stuff that reminded us of friendship and our responses to positive quotes. The aMAZE jouney was one of my most memerable activities of my girl scouting experiecne.

~Alison