Beaver/Cub/Scout Volunteering

Starting back this week.   As often the case a few parents that help have moved up to cubs,  so I’m sticking with beavers and have plans to after my daughter moves up next year.   I’ll stay for my youngest and ….. well I like the leaders for the beavers much more!

I did something like 40 to 44 badges over the summer.   There was a moment where I questioned myself why I sew them!  The 7yo now has as many badges on her blanket as the 9yo as all her Rainbows badges have been moved to it.   It does make a nice record of their achievements.

I’m keen to find out how many of the Beavers have completed the 6 weeks pokemon collection challenge I set them (and might have learnt some map reading skills by osmosis).  My own kids are still addicted, the 9yo having done the 3 months for the cubs collecting badge I hoped I might get some relief but no….’Pokemon walks’ are still a feature!

Doing Fire Safety with the Cubs this week. Anyone got any good activities (that ideally do not result in a trip to A&E)?

Contact your local fire station and see if they’ll give you a tour. We go to ours every couple of years. They do a talk about what to do in the event of a fire then let the kids sit in the vehicles and have a go on a hose.

Contact your local fire station and see if they’ll give you a tour. We go to ours every couple of years

Definitely this – quite a good one to fill a dark winters evening according to our leaders.* We also usually then link it with evenings with Police and Ambulance/First Aid, but we have leaders who are PCSOs and paramedics.

* and guaranteed attendance from loads of parent helpers!

Yes the kids love the fire station tour and the crews are normally very happy to oblige.  We’ve had pcso’s come and talk safety too.  The beavers loved the siren in the car ….. the neighbours less so.

Just got back from a weekend at Hollinwood. If you are after a back woods site with PROPER TOILETS! I’d recommend it. The weather helped!

https://www.hollinwoodcamp.org.uk/

Has anyone been to Blakedean Hostel?

https://penninecalder.org.uk/blakedean/

Can you get up to Top Withens on a T0? It is within height boundaries, was worried about access to habitation/roads inside 30 minutes.

Ooh, tell me more about Hollinwood, we’re looking to do a survival camp next year. I looked on the website but there’s not a lot of information on there.

Website is a little out of date. Toilets only went in about 6 weeks ago. Think welfare unit in a shipping container.

Site consists of a toilet block, a water point, a wood pile and trees. That’s about it.

Ideal for back woods type stuff. We had a parachute up and the older kids in hammocks, whilst the new ones were in tents.

We covered the Naturalist badge.

We did our Survival Camp at Bibby’s Farm. Which is great, but the kids knew that if they walked out of the woods they’d find two toilet blocks, washing up facilities, farm buildings, climbing wall, go-kart track and a tuck shop that could sell them all sorts of tat.

It they left the woods here they would find… more woods.

It “felt” more isolated as there were no distractions.

I left my “Merlin” App running for 10 minutes and got 10 different bird species. One of the kids spotted a badger and we took some plaster casts of animal tracks. They also have beehives on site, so we watched the bees doing what bees do. Lots of spiders and beetles too.

One of the kids spotted a badger

You want to come to Linnet Clough, they’ll be spotting badgers in their tents 🙂

Ours still talk about the fateful camp where one of the boys’ tents got no sleep as they spent the whole night keeping the badger(s) out. The fact that the badger(s) wanted to come in was nothing to do with liberal carpeting of their tent with crisp crumbs, obviously….

a tuck shop that could sell them all sorts of tat.

We did a camp near Stone in the summer (Kibblestone?) and one of the lads came back from the tuck shop with, I kid you not, five metres of bubblegum

We’ve had Badger Raids at Linnet too. We told them not to leave food about. Did they listen? No.

All part of the fun I suppose.

I was helping at beavers tonight,  I’d designed a Space session.   I’d hoped to get my telescopes down there but the logistics of some beavers outside while others are doing other activities inside and the necessary number of adults is beating us… as is the cloud.

So instead it was a relay race to dress the astronaut lodge leader in various layers of space suit, followed by balloon powered rockets along strings and star projectors.  It all worked great!  I’m getting better at judging the time it takes to do stuff too.  The star projectors were really simple but worked so well shining the constellations on to the wall…. hopefully a few are now laying in bed shining their zodiac constellation on their bedroom wall ?

Next week it’s the solar system… and something else,  maybe making space helmets.

With our cubs

I Printed out an A2 picture of the moon (well 4 x A4s sections)

stuck it to the far wall, then printed out and laminated a small Apollo moon lander with some blutak on the back

Then they have to be blindfolded and travel the 350,000 km to the moon and land on the right crater and see how close they get

I’d love to do something Apollo or Artemis mission like,  taking them through different stages of the mission in some kind of game.  Ours are a pretty.. errr…. lively bunch though,  so activities need to be energetic or really grip them or is chaos and planning out an Apollo mission game has so far been beyond me. But..hmm… something like your ‘pin apollo on the right crater’  could help them get a sense of scale….  did you have the other Beavers as mission control shouting instructions/course amendments?

Ooo… something like firing nerf pellets at a target to convey the accuracy needed to get into moon orbit maybe…  hmm!

@kimbers That sounds ace! Wish I’d thought of that when I was a cubs,

Had our annual conker tournament this week with the prize being THE GOLDEN CONKER WOGGLE OF GOLD!

We decided to make our own samosas tonight. Someone suggested using Spam and the Spamosa was born.

Loving the Golden Conker Woggle

We did our annual “Chippy Run” last night where we send out each patrol to a different local chippy armed with a fiver to see what they can get. Then they bring it back to the hut and we all try them and grade them out of 20 taking into consideration value, presentation, taste and environmental impact of the packaging (right on kids!).

One of the local chippies asked what was going on and effectively bribed us with 4 massive boxes or chips and a load of different sauces. So, they inevitably won.

Therefore, we have crowned Chips @ No.8 as The Best Chippy in Prestwich 2024.

The local Mega Chippy (named after a famous drug cheating Texan) scored badly as usual, China Express did a mean curry sauce and would have had a chance if they had bunged us some extras.

Not enough local chippy’s for us to manage that.

Our Squirrels had a Space night this week, the highlight of which was making craters by dropping meteorites (different sized balls) on to a big tray of flour. No idea how Squirrel leaders cope…..

Eldest reported a YouTube ceilidh night was a surprise success with his Scouts once he’d got them counting to 4 in time. That Cambridge music degree finally proving it’s worth (and a lot of nights playing in the Ceilidh Society)

Has anyone done Parliament week? He was surprised how little his Scouts knew given that they are quite a bright and mature group.

We decided to make our own samosas tonight.

Ooh, tell me more… I love doing cooking stuff with them.

Has anyone done Parliament week? He was surprised how little his Scouts knew given that they are quite a bright and mature group.

We did.

Split them into Government and Opposition and made them debate a couple of contentious subjects. A couple of our naturally confident ones did very well.

Had the room set up like the Commons, and the GSL was the Speaker.

Used a mop as the Mace.

See if you can get your local MP to come round for a chat if he/she isn’t a horrible arsehole.

See if you can get your local MP to come round for a chat if he/she isn’t a horrible arsehole.

We’re trying to arrange this, and he’s one of our ex-Scouts 🙂

Not enough local chippy’s for us to manage that.

Sadly same here, but it could be one for a city centre trip in spring – nice idea!

We did activities night on Tuesday on the local tennis court. We had 4 stations: tennis, basketball, hula-hoops and (mine) BOOTCAMP. Had no idea how it would go but was a good laugh and they mostly embraced my Drill Sergeant persona

– You will call me Sarge and only Sarge, anyone who doesn’t gets a black mark.

– What’s a black mark?

– You’ll find out

Turned out to be an extra lap of the courts before Haribo was dished out at the end.

One of our Squirrel leaders husband is an ex army PT and also a yoga instructor, that’s a couple of evenings a year sorted!

I did a second space session with the beavers last week.  They drew out a solar system,  did some games themed around apollo moon missions, and I took my telescopes so they all got a little look at Saturn.   It went better than u expected!  So I’m repeating with the boys and girls brigade tonight if the cloud stays away.   If.

Just about beat the clouds!  We got a view of Jupiter but Saturn disappeared behind a bank of cloud just minutes before the kids came to the telescopes.   I got a look,  a couple of kids from Beavers cubs that missed it the other day got a look….the Brigade kids saw Jupiter only.   Still, that’s a start.

@IHN

the samosas were pretty easy-  1 onion & 1 potato per patrol. Finely chop the onion & dice the potato into small cubes- less than 1cm cubes.

Fry them together to soften then add any other ingredients, & seasoning. We used 1/2 a tin of spam or corned beef per patrol.

Then get some sheets of filo pastry, cut them in half , brush each with egg yolk, add a spoonful of the mixture & fold into a triangle then place in the pan to crispen the pastry

Double post

We’ve lost a couple of local chippies, and 2 remaining ones are a bit too far away- one patrol would be back in 5 minutes and 2 others just over an hour leaving the 4th patrol with nowhere to go.

we took a telescope to camp this year (Pembrokeshire)- the kids loved it. It’s  surprising how fast the moon moves when you’ve got a queue of 30 kids wanting to watch it and the telescope needs adjusting every few minutes

That is where a decent tracking motorised mount comes in, together with its ability to just turn on and point itself at your selected targets makes it a worthwhile investment! Without,  The moon,  low mag, not that fast, easy.  Jupiter or Saturn at 200x so you can see structure in the rings and bands….its across the eyepiece in a minute even with an expensive wide field of view ep!