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 role playing activity, a skit, add a song, joke or make something to liven it up. " Bear 5,8, emergency phone numbers AGAIN (are there really communities without 911 ? ) 11 be ready AGAIN, 13 spending, chart chart chart, bike safety AGAIN, 17 they do this at school, 18 jot it down, school, 19 -24 ok now this fun. Go to a library ?" 5 is sharing your world with wildlife you need to do 4--so make a birdhouse, go to the zoo or a wildlife center, and talk to a wildlife officer. bring in some info about endangered species and toss it all out and make a group poster if you have to. that's 4, right? no homework, no sit and fill out a worksheet. 8, skip it and do something else, since they only have to do 4 out of the 6 choices. or go to a newspaper office and look up some history about your town(ask the newspaper people to find a couple of articles ahead of time. or make a scrapbook page/poster about all the silly guys in the den do the character connect right after a flag ceremony where you have their attention, or have the person at the newspaper office talk about the stuff with them. Have a fireman or police man talk about the safety stuff, the uniform makes them pay more attention.

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 card from SM and make arrangements with mb counselor (with a buddy or parent) to do whatever is necessary to complete the badge. If they are interested, they do so, if the topic wasn't their cup of tea, they move on without ever even getting the blue card. Some merit badge topics should be covered strongly in the troop and patrol meetings, even if you never call it a merit badge. Good high quality first aid, well formed and strong knots to build camp gadgets, a good intro to citizenship, camping, hiking, canoeing, cooking (and especially calling in an expert to provide the education about food safety issues, as well as feeding the boys new and exciting--or just EASY and different meal ideas). All sorts of scout skills lead themselves to an introduction to the badge, and there is no reeason why that can't be explained to the boys--you've alrady done half to 3/4 of the badge just by participating. The rest is up to the youth to complete the badge or not.

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 re-earned the chit and taught the chit and showed that he could be responsible about it. An older scout after this occured volunteered to teach a class to all the scouts on appropriate sized knifes for the job at hand, and which knives should probably never come to any scout thing, what the troop rules about knifes are (no wearing sheath knives, sm approves when sheath knives may be appropriate--but this had not been shared with the youth in years), plus a bit on boy scout camp knife rules in the area, local city and national laws about knifes. But the scout who had the knife problem was suspended for 30 days when he really needed to be the one doing the research and going thru the above class or learning it and teaching it with the other older scout beside him. The 30 day suspension in effect told the scout we didn't want him anymore, and he has not returned so far at 60 days. I do not think he will recharter with our troop. The scout who lassoed his friend wrote up what happened as soon as he was told there was a problem and he needed to see the sm for a conference about it. The scout laid out a list of things he should do including apology letter to the scout and his parents (cause the mom was upset that her son had rope marks at his neck) the scout had apologized as soon as he realized that he lassoed the neck instead of the shoulders, and there were no marks evident until the scout went home and mom saw something. The scout also had a plan to teach a class about the dangers of ropes around body parts you want to keep, choking, the choking game, damage to the windpipe that could occur and that things like this should be reported to the SM. He offered to pay for the dr visit if the scout had gone to the doctor as well (he did not need medical care of any kind). The committee chair wanted to suspend the boy for 30 days, the SM thought the scout's plan was ideal and wanted to just do that. I told them they needed to always involve a third adult in these things since obviously they do not agree. Scout was suspended for 7 days, but after a lot of discussion is going to be allowed to attend PLC to see if they want him to teach the class according to his plan. He figured it fit in with the rest of the knot and rope stuff, and based on status of the troop rope box, they all need to learn some rope respect including whipping/fusing and coiling rope correctly and getting it all away from being a tangled mess. I'm just not looking forward to the committee meeting.

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 deal, as the actual pages of content within the merit badge books is only redone maybe every 10 years. so old books will usually cover about the same things as the newer books. just follow the most recent requirements and use the mb books as resources. If it's a good price for a lot of books that you might use, and they aren't too old (like look for 2000's not 1990's publication dates perhaps) then go for it after checking that your troop doesn't have a bunch of books you can borrow at zero cost.

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), The two of them have already started making plans/forms, writing a discipline policy and disciplining boys using what they've come up with. There has been a bit of contact with Ih since COR is MIA abou discipline with an answer "of course you need a discipline policy and consequences and we want scouting to be a safe place free of bullying etc." Disciple so far has jumped from nothing to 30 day and 7 day suspensions for an inappropriate size knife and a lasso of a boy leaving marks (this was marks on neck area cause of where the rope landed and struggle to remove the rope, but was not malicious). Anyway, so the point of my post is not to complain about this so far treatment of our youth. this discipline policy stuff will come up at the committee mtg Monday night. So I want to ask you guys if a troop is going to have discipline policies written out, what is a reasonable policy to have "on the books"?? Does your troop have well written discipline policy, or do you wing it and trust your SM to figure it out? Does what your troop use for discipline work or not? There is considerations of overall guides something like this: 1st offense, SM conference, 2nd, SM conference with parents, 3rd, SM conference and BOR with 3 committee members. and at 3rd offense suspension could be an option, 4th offense = meeting with SM, CC, COR and parents regarding removal from the troop?? are certain serious infractions, or repetitive SM conferences mean we could jump to 3rd or 4th level more quickly?? Is the count reset after a certain amount of time?? Is the count reset as log as it's for different things (with the slate wiped clean between different things?) are possible infractions spelled out? lying, stealing, alcohol, tobacco, weapons, drugs, fighting, causing serious injury...??? are possible punishments spelled out? are there steps spelled out for how things are usually handled collect info and report of what happened from both parties? do you ask each party to write down what happened? with sm conference with scouts involved (together or separate) to continue to gather data. parents called if its serious, or for pick up if scout needs to go home and return for sm conference after things cool off, etc? Do you keep a written log of incidents and how they are handled for future reference? (negates the slate wiped clean, but helps with repetitive issues) Any info or suggestions would be welcome. I honestly feel that most infractions in scouting should be handled with education, and logical consequences rather than punitive punishment. not sure how that fits into a discipline policy though.

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 consider but talk to the ceremonies team adviser to see what is recommended or if they have an expense or if there is something you can provide (like firewood if they do a ceremonial fire) that would cut down on cost for them. Definitely call and get your date on the calendar and be alittle flexible if something else is already in your spot. Our team likes to avoid monday nights so they don't miss their own troop meetings. and of course any ordeal weekends, or camporee weekends, and stuff like that the OA is often busy those weekends so you may need to choose something else. You should provide your own arrows. Notify the scoutmaster of troops your body are crossing into to be there to accept them when they cross over the bridge. be sure to talk to the OA that they will do an arrow of light ceremony for all who receive aol, but a few might not get it done and still want/need to bridge over to boy scouts. as well as the OA will usually do a bridging ceremony (an short add on to the aol ceremony usually) and you need to be sure you know what will happen with any boy who doesn't want to cross to boy scouts. we had an incident where a boy wanted to cross the bridge but was still deciding between 2 different troops, and that became a bit of a mess. the ideal is that they should have just had both scoutmasters welcome him to the other side of the bridge and invite him to come visit them to make up his final decision asap. with LDS I'd imagine your boys mostly will continue in boy scouting, and the unit may sort of already be decided for him, so that might not be any issue to worry about. Oh also talk to the ceremony team about if they have any rules about LDS units that you should know about. I mean that for a time our team was getting called out every month or so to do a crossover for another boy, since it's all by birthdate. They felt 1. it was a lot of trips to the same place, 2. seeing the ceremony so very often, the boys in the pack were getting kind of bored with the whole ceremony thing. so they decided to limit each unit to one ceremony a year, maybe 2. what that would mean is you'd wait, they'd get the fancy ceremony a few boys together at the same time.

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 each one, covering maybe 5 miles in the process. We will usually have the standard christian groups catholics, protestant, methodists,etc and LDS but also Jewish, Muslim and sometimes we get Hindu (they usually talk in a park setting along the way). Each group talks about one of the Commandments, how it applies in their religion if it does, and then talks a little bit about their church and opens it up to the youth to ask questions, where you get the questions of why the pastor wears those robes or why the church windows are stained glass or why there are all these symbols on the wall. You could do similar by visiting a few religious organizations/churches in your area to expose them to options, with their parents approval of course. However, by the time they are Boy Scouts, they'll need to determine if they have a faith in a higher power or not. They do not have to belong to a religious organization, so they don't have to be a member of a church, and don't have to earn the emblem of faith in their religion, but they have to have a faith in a higher power. It is best to have this discussion soon, rather than put it off for the scoutmaster to be caught unaware later on, and it to become an issue of someone getting kicked out.

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 prizes, colored some, and talked quietly in the corner and the adults got thru as much as possible. kids made it thru a half hour before they were antsy, and we called it good enough. Virtually everything else we do as a committee in a small pack wil be done thru emails, txts, phone calls and quick meetings before or after den or pack mtgs.

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 kids. whatever you have to do to make it work. I think in person mtgs even if much much shorter are better than just phone/conference calls.

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 leftover glue or paint you can find. also you can use the paint stir sticks sanded down really well, use shoe polish for stain drill a hole in one end and put a shoe lace thru and string up beads or buttons or whatever that you can find to show what they did for the year. look for the pattern for the old cous stick from the old webelos leader book. the little blocks make one den worths giant jenga game (familyfun or whatever it's called now has directions), you can also google KUUB it's a swedish lawn bowling game. we made a den set out of scrap wood pieces including a scrap dowel someone had from a closet bar they replaced. have the guys sand them, paint them, etc. have them make their own career arrows, see if the cc would pay for those. check a local bow shop and see if they will help you out--a local bow shop sells us the arrows for $6 but you could have the boys do something to pay for the arrows plain with just the feathers, lash on a fake rock type arrowhead, and then work with them to pinstripe paint colors on it as they earn badges thru the year. have them cut the wood nicely, sand it, drill two holes, stick in 2 dowels (or pencils), paint it all up nicely. the you loop a rubber band over the two dowels and take a plastic spoon (or make a little spoon like thing out of wood pieces) and you put the spoon in the rubber bands and twist it round and round, put a small ball in the spoon and let go and it's a catapult. I'd count it for craftsman and/or engineer depending on how craft like it is. similarly cut and shape a base piece of wood, drill a hole in the center and put in a long dowel, sand, paint, etc and it's a neckerchief slide holder. have them try whittling a shape out of the softer of the wood you have to use as a neckerchief. there are tons and tons of ideas that don't cost much of anything. check with home depot/lowes, sometimes they do a birdhouse thing that doesn't cost anything and they provide the kits. sometimes joannes or michaels will do something cheap or free as well. also ask if they have any scraps that are too small to sell that could be used by cubs I would consider asking your primary president or other stake leader if there is any way around this. For metal working, get cans all the same size, freeze water in them, and using a big nail and a hammer, have the boys punch holes to make a pattern. use scrap candes (or tell them they ahve to provide their own candle), and a pipe cleaner or a piece of clothes hanger for a hanger for their lantern. You can make hardening clay and have them make a project--neckerchief slide or an arrowhead to go on their career arrow, or something to hang from their cous stick. more than just cut something out of clay and let it dry. I'd count it for artist if they do a good enough job,to show the overlap between art and craftsman projects. there are a bunch of pow wow books that have tons of ideas for craftsman type things that don't involve a lot of cost. consider a check online at baloos bugle and boy scout trail and other sites like that.

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 scouts for the rest of the year. Our unit would get a few people, but usually they'd join and promptly drop--because the $8 to join would be less than the cost of going to the zoo for the day--so parents would already have gotten their money's worth even if they never went to a scout meeting at all. The couple of scouts we got out of that program that stuck around had understanding parents that realized that was just registration fee for national BSA and to actualy do anything they'd have to pay some other kind of fee. It may be the easiest way to approach this is that this is National's registration fee, and then the rest is a monthly dues payment to cover the cost of materials--which it's a lot easier if you just pay that $x per month up front please or in 2 easy payments. you get the same $ but it doesn't seem as much like a bait and switch thing.

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 people. 4 scouts showed up. 2 tigers, 1 bear and a webelos 5th grader. We talked about the minimum of 5 registered scouts and 5 registered adults. we talked about options, things we could do, joining another pack, recruiting. everyone went home with the idea to come the next week and bring a friend. So tonight we tried again--a den mtg to play games with boys scouts, do Bobcat stuff, and talk to parents. and we got 4 tigers, 1 wolf, 1 bear, 1 4th grade webelo and 1 5th grade webelo. They decided that yes, they want to have a pack and keep it going. Everyone went home with directions to do online training at myscouting.org and come back prepared for adult leader training night next wednesday nite--we are going to try to make out a calendar for pack mtgs and events, and figure out which items can all be done together as a group, etc. and for everyone to bring a friend. right now we look pretty much like the local LDS packs in size and with only 1 or 3 in each grade. Whether that's good, bad or just different I'm not sure. Sigh.

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 HUGE push to get Tigers registered at the end of May/first of June so they could participate in the Pack's summertime events, and go to day camp or resident camp. so it would make sense for those boys who join and go to all the summertime events to be able to get the Tiger Summertime Pack award pin--otherwise they don't get any pin at all? As to 2nd year webelos then getting two webelos pins, well in 8 years of doing the summertime pack award, I've only had a small handful of boys who actually earned the webelos summertime pack award both summers. Usually we lose them to a family vacation in June or July so there is no way they can attend, especially two summers in a row. I had some leftovers of the plain gold summertime pack award pins that they used to offer (cause used to be you could earn 5 plain gold summertime pack award pins) and I gave the boys who earned the pin two times as webelos a choice of a second webelos pin or a plain gold pin and most chose to get the webelos pin a 2nd time. So no big deal. Be consistent, and figure out what you'll do with tigers who join before August if they earn the award, and what you'll do with 2nd year webelose if they earn the award. as long as you have a reasonable answer for those instances nobody will care. Aside from the fact that the pin color goes with the color of their neckerchief, even though we think it should go with the color of their rank patch, and the wolf and webelos pins get mixed up anyways. most boys are never going to earn all 5 years of pins anyway.

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 auto parts store, used scrap tree branches and leather shoelaces to tie the corners after first wrapping them with some wire I had to be sure they'd stay together. Non wood projects we made clay neckerchief slides, we made metal juice can lides ito christmas ornaments, we got a leatherworking kit from the scout shop and a set of letters that the pack paid for as long as they could use for future years and everyone made a bracelet with their name, we made fishing line christmas trees, and god's eye neckerchief slides, and a carved animal neckerchief slide we got on clearance at the scout shop (the backs broke off so we glued on pvc). Always on the lookout for small crafty things to do that took a bit more effort. Oh yeah, we also got a birdhouse kit at the scout shop for ike 1.88 each, but had planned on doing the 1 board birdhouse with the boys making all the cuts. a pinewood derby car, a stand for a pinewood derby car(from scrap pieces of wood) and we made buddy board walkers with the wolf den cause they needed help with the sawing and screwing and knot tying. We also made cous sticks that used to be in the webelos leader book, and a small toolbox and step stool for handyman. If you can get scrap wood, you can do all sorts of things.

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.