scottteng

Yeah a little bit the reason behind the push to get boys to first class rank is they tend not to quit once they have achieved it. A lot of us are guilty of requiring First class rank for certain trips or perks as is the BSA. OA membership being the primary example. Leaders have usually attained a comfort level with scouts that have been around long enough to get to first class know what their strengths and weaknesses are and also how they will react in most situations. FCFY is a challenging but realistic goal but it does require almost %100 participation from a scout. Your less committed scouts will not get there and unfortunately many will find that scouting just does not fit into their sports, school, band, family or other schedule. However rank advancement is just one part of scouting and if a young man is happy just going to some meetings and attending only outings that are of particular interest I am not going to throw him out. Like most other things one gets out of scouting in direct proportion to what one puts in.

"Boy Scouting, one of the traditional membership divisions of the BSA, is available to boys who have earned the Arrow of Light Award and are at least 10 years old or have completed the fifth grade and are at least 10, or who are 11, but not yet 18 years old " http://www.scouting.org/boyscouts.aspx "Remind Webelos Scouts that they can join a troop any time after they turn 10 and have completed the Arrow of Light requirements." http://www.scouting.org/boyscouts/resources/patrolplus.aspx Looks like younger brother will meet his six months since his 10th birthday in August. Why can't older brother hang around if your pack is like most the summer is just a couple of events anyway and most of those turn into family ones. If he wants to wait for brother let him do it. Or alternatively if they both insist on going to a troop let em go then the SM can be the bad guy if he is so inclined. I would not go so far as to award him his AOL until the requirements met but let him take his book to the SM and show him the completed requirements. If these boys had waited a year and shown up on a troops doorstep most troops would snap both up without a second thought.

Yes glad to see that correction the coldest I have ever been in my life was a council cub family camp at camp Wallwood near Tallahassee when the temp was at 25 degrees. now to you northern die hards thats not even cold but to me in Florida with my promotional sleeping bag it darn sure was. My Tiger cub son was cozy as could be in his 0 degree mummy bag. I was ready to hike the two miles to my car to drive to the holiday inn express down by the I10 exit. I did survive and you will too make sure all your party are equipped with a sleeping bag rated for 20 degrees less than the projected low plus an extra blanket or two for good measure. February and March are not real cold here in South Florida if the Web's can't find an outdoor event to attend they are not trying. The last weekend of this month we are going to an event at a local air and space museum and if the ink is dry on their application not only will they have their event but two MB's to go on their sash.

I guess I look at overnighter different than some do. To my mind an overnight trip is one that people stay overnight at. Whether that overnight be at a campground, in a cabin, on a ball field, on a ship, in the aquarium or whatever. The only specific exception to BALOO trained person is for Council Family Camp where Council has planned, staffed, and collected fees for. If a pack wants to do their own outings BALOO is the training to attend. As a matter of fact that is where they are told the specific whys and wheres of tour permits for their council. I would like to see BALOO be part of required training for all den leaders. BALOO is readily available being offered twice per year in our district alone and it is not a long involved training about 5.5 to six hours including lunch. The answer is to require all cub leaders to attend BALOO to complete basic training and be eligible for Woodbadge just as Webelos leaders must attend WALOO and SM & ASM attend IOLS. In short send all your cub leaders to BALOO and avoid asking others how to blow off the rules and do what you were going to do anyhow.

What a fabulous idea someone came up with kudos to the pack who thought of inviting you to their Blue and Gold. Why get Bonzo the birthday party magician that you have to pay when you could have a crew of excited motivated teens come in and show the cubs what they do for fun.

A better use of knives would be to make a craft then if you wish to turn it into a game of sorts you could have a judging with winners in as many categories as desired. In cub scouts for the younger boys they do whittlin chit which is knife safety but they make a soap carving. That would be a good first knife training exercise and if you have some artists in the group produce some very nice carvings as well. Soap is not as difficult to carve as wood so you can cut back the bandaid order. Make sure they are taught to always cut away from their body and by all means teach sharpening as sharp knives are safer than dull ones.

The reason for crossing boys over before summer is to let them get some meetings and a couple of campouts under their belt before summer camp. Despite troops fund raising efforts and scholarships summer camp is somewhat pricey. The troop and hopefully the parents do not want to have boys being picked up from summer camp on Tuesday or Wednesday because of the tearful calls home to mom "I got to come home mom I just can't take this any more the boys are mean the food is inedible." In shor I'm homesick and I know how to push your buttons so you will drive several hours to come pick me up. We don't want parents wasting money sending boys to camp and then being manipulated into rescuing them. If the boys have been on a couple of trips the parents are used to the awful food and everyones mean gripes. Mostly those translate too they made me eat what I fixed even though I burned it and my patrol leader actually made sure I did my share of the work. Once they get in the swing of things most of them get excited about the merit badges they will earn and the fun stuff (shooting, climbing, nature, scout craft, aquatics) they will be doing. The weekend trips are the inoculations against the big scary week away from home. By the time reach WEBELOS age they are usually ready for the next step away from mom and dad being their every inch of the way and to reaching onward and upward for their own accomplishments which are available to them in boy scouts even though there are still adults around to make sure that it is done in a safe manner.

Yes the banning of DDT has killed one million people per year in Africa due to malaria spread by mosquitoes. That is why they are starting to produce and use this very effective pesticide again. What needs to happen is for for actual "toxic" levels of substances to be carefully determined. When they talk about PPB parts per billion there is usually no associated toxicity and the effects are negligible. Everyone needs to check out the link I posted lots of people are killed every year by exposure to DiHydrogen Oxide. It is one of the leading killers of scout age children as well. We need to Ban DiHydrogen Oxide immediately. http://www.gopetition.com/online/2479.html

One would prefer to have the range back up on a natural "out of bounds" area such as an area of dense brush or woods or a body of water so that you could rope off the sides and prevent unpleasant surprises. Depending on the venue of the event the local police dept may want to inspect and approve your range after it has been set up especially if it is on public property such as a park. They may also come up with additional regulations such as BB traps that they want installed to prevent "environmental contamination". A hill or berm is very nice also. A temporary berm may be constructed of hay bales depending on the cost of hay. After the event the hay can be recycled for its original purpose as long as the bales are broken up and the hay tossed around to allow the bb's to drop out. A heavy tarp hung behind the target area will make a decent backstop and if you get it big enough to form a trough on the ground collect most of the bb's. Have fun!

"Basic Adult Leader Outdoor Orientation (BALOO) is a one-day training event that introduces leaders and parents to the skills needed to plan and conduct pack outdoor activities, particularly pack camping." http://www.scouting.org/cubscouts/training/baloo.aspx BALOO is not just for camping it is for any outdoor outing even a trip to the park. There is a logical progression to training a WEBELOS leader gets WALOO as part of his training regiment. A Scoutmaster or Assistant gets IOLS introduction to outdoor leader skills. We get a lot of calls when Woodbadge classes are forming for IOLS as SM's and ASM's are informed that their basic training is not complete without it. BALOO is naturally the less rigorous course no overnight needed. WALOO and IOLS involve actual camping the Boy Scout leaders 2 nights the WEBELOS leaders come in Sat AM and join the troop just as their charges will. There are some cub breakouts on Sat. The training continues through campfire and Sun AM sessions.

Can be done? Some enviro nut will gladly spend billions of your money to try to solve this unsolvable problem.Probably better to focus on banning a real killer: http://www.gopetition.com/online/2479.html

I cannot imagine that any troop would not welcome a webelos and his supervising parent of course on any campout. Of course if the troops your talking to are not camping then they are not the sort of troop one should be joining. We had 3 prospects on our trip last month and expect more this month. Unless the troop has just too many members WEBELOS crossing over is a major recruiting tool.

http://users.scronline.com/troop77/EquipmentTrader/backpacks.htm The person at the above web site has sizing parameters in inches listed as torso measurement if you click the torso box on the site it will show you how to measure this. Most packs are adjustable to some degree.

Cracker barrel is a fancy name for snack. The younger the boys the more snacks they consume per day. A camporee or troop Cracker Barrel is the before bed snack late in the evening. If your boys are trustworthy with them you can have them toast marshmallows or even make s'mores. Some troops adjust the eating schedule to eat late in the evening they more often have an afternoon snack.

Sword fights, jousting, pull sword from rock. Lets see make into patrol activity. Sword fight with pool noodles with baseball helmets with the face shields winding up not allowed. Jousting piggyback race with man up with lance to catch hoop off a stand make it a timed relay race or just top team. pour sword into fake rock gimmick it so can be pulled out occasionally . make crossbows to shoot marshmallows at 2litre bottles

http://www.scouter.com/forums/viewThread.asp?threadID=184794 The PL reference came from his intro thread above.

QM is a tough position my son did a turn there and hated every minute of it. He actually likes being librarian. He also hated patrol leader. He was under the impression that all the other boys would do what he said without smarting off to the PL like he would. He got a rather rude awakening.

Howdy from the west coast. Your halfway to Eagle. Keep your patrol motivated.

One should never forget 50% of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class!

I think she is referring to age just for WEBELOS. The maximum age a cub scout is allowed to be is 11 which is the minimum age for boy scouts. If the young man is interested and willing to work he can complete the program in a year. There is no reason to wait for August though as soon as school is out he is officially a WEBELOS and can start working on the requirements and if he wants to AOL probably should. It is up to you and him he could join boy scouts at eleven even if he was never in cubs. The boys know at right around that age they get bored with cub scouts and are chomping at the bit to get to the greater challenges that await them in the troop. My son crossed over technically a year early because he is a September baby and would turn 11 well before WEB II was complete. He had completed all his AOL as had couple of other boys that went to all the outings. If you decide to stay with the pack make sure to check with the council office and let them know some of them want to bump those 11 year olds up to a troop ASAP.

I don't really think that the price is that much of a problem. We have a scout who proudly proclaims that his tennis shoes which he is wearing on a campout are $200 shoes but this same scout cannot afford proper uniform pants. It is all in where their priorities lie. I am starting to see switchbacks on E-bay. My son and I have had ours for over a year and they seem to be fairly durable. The boys tend to outgrow stuff quickly so the uniform closets should stay full. All of the old uniforms are still official as well and in my area Florida it makes more sense to buy up several pairs of old style shorts for camp pants than buying multiple pairs of switchbacks. For those of you in the frozen northland switchbacks lend themselves to layering much better than the old cotton/poly long pants.

The best I can say about the egg in a bag thing is that I ate mine. My scrambled eggs were a little runny and my bacon was burnt and stuck to the paper. If I was at a waffle house I would have sent it back was my comment to the other adults. We were trying with all of this to focus on fire cooking and to have the new kids get through 2nd class 2G without too much notice. The boys are fairly adept at stove cooking as they do more of that. There are much better meals IMHO to cook over a fire burgers, steak, sausages, and dogs come to mind. As to the fruit thing that is a symptom of adult menu checking. The boys will survive a weekend without fruit. The reason it is forced on them is the food pyramid and mom thing. We have found that it is more effective to have freely available fruit snacks. Oranges and grapefruits fresh picked from someone's tree along with apples, grapes, watermelons, or other fruit in season along with a stock of canned peaches, fruit cocktail, and pie mix for the over fire pies or dutch oven cobblers. The fruit eaters will eat it the avoiders will avoid but it is low spoilage.

At what point do we have to draw the line and say we are sorry but the troop is not able to certify that the food served can be maintained allergen free. If an allergy is so severe that any contact is life threatening: for example the nut free patrol running out of cooking oil to dress their dutch oven unknowingly borrows peanut oil from patrol B or Cross contamination occurs at a washing station. Like most troops in this area we have a single wash station that all the patrols use in turn. Maybe the youth that are that allergic should be permitted to bring their own food and allowed to use their own mess kit to prepare same which they will have total control over its cleaning as well. I understand the importance of patrols eating and cooking together what I am curious about is where the safety issue line needs to be drawn.

Yes it is terrible the way the scouts waste food but there is always the inclination for all the grubmasters to get just a little extra too. This weekend we were doing individual cooking over the fire it is our "survival" weekend. For lunch they had MRE's left over from last month when they got evacuated due to tornado warnings. A lot of those went in the trash and not just the kids. Dinner was foil dinners we had a couple of extra burgers but lots of extra onions and peppers about the 11&12 year olds share some of them just had a burger in their foil dinner. Breakfast was one of those found in book things which sounds super lunch bag two strips of bacon on bottom, handful of tater tots, little cheese crack two eggs over and fold bag hang over fire on stick for ten minutes close enough for heat but not to catch. In real life its a little more difficult and takes a while longer, most of the troop raided the trailers oatmeal supply or grabbed mess kit frying pans instead. We had a WEBELOS with us for his camp with troop outing to the amazement of everyone his dad included this kid cooked and ate an even dozen eggs. Thank God we had the eggs available.

Let the boys take care of it and stay out of the way of them taking care of it. In other words when you see the stinky scout being dragged to the shower by his mates you do your best Ray Charles imitation. May be worthwhile to let SPL know that you need a chance to practice that imitation. Don't let em go as far as wire brushes.