A Bear Achievement That Really Taught

I would like to relate a happy experience I had this summer. Our den
had a family camping overniter back in June. As I was planning the
activities for the weekend, I decided that I would have them work on the
Bear achievement of making plaster casts of their shoe prints. However I was
going to add a wrinkle into it in that they would then match up their prints
to one made somewhere else to determine who had made it.

Well, I spotted a shoe print in the mud (it rained a lot that weekend)
and decided that was the one I would use to compare to. I had all the boys
make good prints in the dirt at another site. We mixed up the plaster and
poured it in. The stuff hardened as advertized. We removed the casts and
then I trapsed them all over to the print I had picked out earlier. I was
beaming that here the boys would now learn how the police used casts to
identify criminals.

We made a cast of the subject print. When it was hard we all compared
the casts. None of the boy's casts matched the target print. I went "Ok
right how could this happen to me. So much for the lesson."

The boys however were not deterred. They went to the lodge where we
were staying and low and behold they found a pair of shoes that matched the
print. It seems that one of the boys had changed his shoes between the time
the first print was made and I had them make their prints. I cound not have
thought of a better way of teaching the boys on this topic if I had tried.

Steve Poole Den 1 Pack 445 Indianhead Council

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