5yearscouter

The den meeting resource guide especially for Bears seems to be written by a school teacher, rather than a fun den leader. It is full of send this home as homework, do this worksheet in a meeting. It is NOT FUN! Everything in the Bear book that is required can be done with very little write, sit and talk about it, worksheet, homework. Break it up, if it's something to write, turn it into the fastest group writing project done as a group as gathering activity. If it's talk about it, do a very fast talk about one point right after you do a hands on flag ceremony, turn it into charades or r

Sometimes our boys show an interest in a new activity or delving more into a topic. usually there is an outing or campout related to it. So a merit badge counselor may be called in as an expert to give some info/training to supplement what the scouts or other leaders know. They may also go on the outing, and the merit badge counselor may provide more knowledge about the topic along the way. So during the course of that month ish time period, a scout may get 1 part or half or more done on the merit badge by participating. However, if they want to complete the badge, they go get a signed blue c

http://www.scoutstuff.org/bsa/literature-media/certificates/pocket/cub-scout-academics-sports-pocket-certificate.html we give a card like that for all ranks, and for belt loops. Our boy scouts include the Arrow of Light pocket certificate with their ranks and merit badges when they go for eagle. They file all the cards in a binder with baseball card holder pockets.

He has to earn it, he does't have to be awarded it, since that is a cost involved that many packs can't afford to duplicate. Give them the card to shwo he re-earned it, encourage him to earn the pin for the sport as well, since that's something higher to strive for. But the pack doesn't have to go buy the belt loop again.

Thanks everybody. What you say is what I think. There should not really be punishments for the sake of punishment. I believe the SM is more toward logical consequences and re-education rather than punitive, but the committee chair is strongly thinking there must be punishment to show the parents that scouting is a safe environment. The scout who brought the inappropriate sized knife had done so more than once, but never had his totn chit taken away, or had to reteach totn chit to others, if he were being sneaky that his parent needed to know he couldn't bring any knives to scouts until he

You can buy at the scout shop the Boy Scouts Requirements book which changes every year to show what the current requirements are for the ranks and merit badges. they print a new one every single year. this is a good thing to have on hand, or at least check at scouting.org for the current requirements for merit badges. merit badge.org will have pretty close/accurate lists of requirements but they sometimes miss something since they aren't an official BSA website. Boy's life also has some resources for merit badges. If you buy merit badge books and they are a bit old, that's not a huge de

So troop has been lax with discipline over the years, often it's a little adult warning and no follow up by SM for even things that became a habit/problem. New SM who wants to have a bit more discipline--not letting boys get away with bullying or hurting others etc without some sort of consequences. Com Chair thinks more boys needs to be suspended from the troop if there is a pattern or anyone gets hurt even accidentally, or without malice. that at this point they seem to be leaning toward harsher punishments than ever before (going from no consequences to now suspending youth),

My boys do OA ceremonies for AOL. Some packs done give anything money wise, but they usually invite the boys to eat with them, esp since the ceremonies are often along with the Blue and Gold banquet. or to have cake and ice cream with the pack after the crossover. Some packs realize that there is some cost involved, aside from regalia and drums, but also firewood, fire starting supplies, maybe oil for the smudge pots, or gas for the vehicle. Our OA ceremonies boys usually go for ice cream after the ceremonies esp if no food is offered to them. So $20 would be a small token amount to co

lowest recruitment in 8 years

I live in an area of Phoenix that gets flood irrigation to water my pasture for the horse. when I take my allotment of water, I get about 6-8 inches of water. Plenty to float the flat bottomed john boat with a couple of webelos in it. actually it will float my canoe in some areas as well. yes, here in the desert, my sons got to learn to paddle a boat in the backyard.....

Oh and it's your ticket, you can change it if you need to. just talk to your troop guide. it's not written in stone.

Yeah, technically your Athiest Webelos cannot be members of the BSA. there is certainly no Emblem of Faith they can earn since they don't have any faith in God, eh? At Webelos level, we take it to mean that the youth is exploring his faith and whether he believes or not, but that his parents are declaring themselves Athiest. so our pack doesn't kick them out for that. We do encourage them to explore other faiths, and an excellent way to do it locally is thru the 10 commandment hike that Grand Canyon Council puts on, where we visit the house of worship for many denominations, hike to ea

The pie chart would be nice to be able to click to see who needs what training in a nice little list. At least you can add missing training dates, and print a list of who has expired or expiring YPT.

We start our pack year with one mandatory parent meeting/leader meeting. We try to have a 2nd on in January. We go thru everything i the calendar, who needs to do what jobs, what our fundraising needs are and options, vote on anything important and get to know each other a bit with cheese and crackers and veggie tray and such. Last night was our mandatory parents meeting. Everybody brought their kids. I could have sworn that all discussion, emails and txts that went out said to try to leave the kids at home. So the kids ate all the snacks, looked at all the cool popcorn selling p

So you make the rule that everyone has to complete a leader application and choose a job. You do your committee meetings in chunks, 15 minutes before or after any other scout mtg, with kids welcome, even if you have to buy extra craft kits etc. That's what we are looking at doing, totally going more informal for committee mtgs than ever before, but we don't have time, meeting space and the will to meet on a diff night of the week than the scout meetings on weds nights. another option is to recruit a den chief to act primarily as a babysitter during the committee meetings and bring all the

Let me think about it. we don't usually spend much on craftsman things. I'd ask the parents if they have any scrap wood you could use. I'd ask my pastor and the people at church if they have any scrap wood things. Definitely ask the people who may come in an make a project with the boys for their recommendations for the cheapest, scrap wood projects using whatever they have laying around. go to home depot, get paint stir sticks, usually free if you just get a few at a time. make the mini shelving unit someone linked to with rulers. have them cut, sand, glue, paint with whatever leftove

We have debated that we can keep all of our fees the same this year if we just drop all the Boy's Life subscriptions.... You think other units will consider that option? Wonder what National will think of that option? We've dealt with council/district publishing flyers with low ball prices to join and flooding the local schools with the flyers for years. We'd have a local small zoo give free admittance to any scout or scout leader in uniform in conjunction with a recruiting day. The flyer would say in May that it would be like $8 to get into the zoo and pay for registration in your cub

So...it's been a while since I wrote the Original Post. To follow up. Sent hom 3000 flyers from the 13 schools we can recruit from. yes, that's a lot of flyers, a lot of schools and a lot of potential scouts. Recruting nite I went in to it with NO EXISTING SCOUTS. Some are sort of interested,but wanted to see what happened with recruiting before deciding. Brought two boy scouts as a bit of help to play games. 8 years of cub scouting displays and photos, leader books, sample uniforms, yadda yadda yadda. Had received txts, emails, and phone calls from about 20 peopl

We have never had a boy work on his rank after June 1st. We tell them the end of May is the cut off, go thru a graduation ceremony to the next rank with changes of hats and neckers the end of may and they get new books. the boys really don't care to go back and finish the old stuff once that new book gets in their hot little hands.

dedkad, if you have 8 bears on May 31st, then on June 1st council database changes their rank and you have webelos, so you do the paperwork for the summertime pack award based on how many are in your brand new webelos den for the summer. The goal of the award is to keep them active in the summer so you don't lose them by the fall.

http://www.boyscouttrail.com/external_frame.asp?goto=/webelos/w2/pdfs/book.htm there are webelos activity ideas for all the webelos pins

Somewhere in the BSA documents/leader book it says that the rank a boy is working on, and what den they are in is what you would call them. So a boy who is going into 3rd grade, National says they are Bear Scouts, they are in your Bear den and they are working toward their Bear badge, right? Why would you give them a Summertime Pack Award pin for wolf? Makes no sense. As to the question of why have a Tiger summertime Pack award if there aren't any tigers--they don't get any new tigers in the pack until the fall--well at the time the Summertime pack award was rolled out, there was a HUG

Let's see for craftsman we did way more than we HAD to. People brought in ideas, some were more crafts and some were more skilled. we did some kind of project every month I think, rather than craftsman all at once, because it's fun to make stuff in the middle of more boring actiity pins. for the display stand or picture frame, we made the "animal skin" patch holder out of the bear book--we never got around to it for bear, and as webelos they were all transferring to the tan shirts and needed somewhere to put the stuff from their blue shirts. Cut the animal skin out of chamois from the

Joe Bob, that is what my den chief usually does with the new scouts that show up to the first mandatory cub scout parent meeting. teaches them knots, lets them tie him to a chair and then they roll him up and down the hallway of the school.

check out the knot tying requirements for tiger, wolf, bear, and webelos level. Note, I don't think there is one for tiger (6 year olds), most struggle to tie their shoes. Wolves learn to tie their shoes, tie a package, tie a stopper knot. Bears move on to a few real knots. webelos with a bit of a purpose for the knot. I'd say there is a still a big interest in the survival bracelets. in "girly" colors they might be appropriate and with enough help any age can do the basic pattern.