mrwoolery

Involving parents is vital. One of the best things about scouting (from a parental perspective) is that my son and I have had more focus for our fun together. Our pack is great about giving parents the opportunity to be involved. One thing that can help is to have new parents leaf through the manual for a few minutes and pick one achievement they feel they are really well-suited to helping the kids with. You might find someone who is a chef, a carpenter, a thespian, a police officer, or an artist. Whatever! There's going to be something that person can look at and say "sure, I can

Our pack does it with each den having a winner. This means that Tigers are not trying to compete with Webs. The winners from each pack can compete against one-another, though. Suggestions: 1 - decide ahead of time if non-standard designs will be allowed. There's actually a lot of good to be said about those designs, as kids will learn a bit about boat design from them. If you have big enough dens, you can run a separate race for non-standard boats. 2 - tell the parents and kids whether they will be blowing through a straw or just mouth. My son wanted to practice this year

One site for a simpler version of the cookie tin banjo: http://dennishavlena.com/banjo.htm A book worth looking at is Dennis Waring's book Cool Cardboard Instruments. There are some very cheesy things in there, but also some real instruments that use cardboard. Many of these could be adapted to work well with other resonating containers. Another site to see is the Folk Urban Music site, especially the Ukulele he makes out of a cheap plastic container, a bit of foam-core posterboard, and toothpicks for frets! http://www.geocities.com/tpe123/folkurban/uke/uke.html I have m