Apologies for missing the blog last week however it worked out quite nicely as I now get to combine the 2 into an outdoors extended piece. Enjoy!
Directional Challenge – 3rd May
This week at Scouts, we decided it was best if we continued to scrub up on map work for summer camp. Neil planned a route for the Scouts around Sulham Woods all the way down to the massive incentive that is McDonalds.
Each Leader took one group of Scouts of a similar age group to work on their map skills. We also had various people from some of the Scouts families join us who tagged along with us.
The Scouts in my group specifically took it in turns to direct and lead navigation before coming together at the end to navigate the last part. They all navigated very well coming to justified decision about where they had to go.
As you can imagine, plenty of McDonalds was consumed during the space of time after the hike.
Camp Skills – 10th May
With camp fast approaching and some Scouts needing a run down of the basic camp skills and various smaller parts of some challenge badges to clean up on, we decided to get the best of both worlds and do both at once.
Ben organised a rotating bases evening in which the Scouts covered a varying amount of skills necessary for camp and that covered parts of the challenge badges that many of the Scouts had not achieved. These bases included:
- Effective Rucksack Packing (especially important for this Summer Camp!)
- Uses of Axes and Saws (including Safety)
- Route Planning
- Camp Hygiene and the Countryside Code
If you want to know more detail about the badges, you can look at the challenge badges in OSM or on the Scouts website. We covered criteria from the Outdoor and Expedition Challenge.
For next weeks meeting, the Leaders are taking a step back. Instead our resident PL’s and APL’s are taking up the challenge of running a meeting following the notion of Youth Shaped Scouting. I’m looking forward to see what they get up to and I’m planning on providing some feedback the week after.
Next week at the hall as normal,
Ellis
