Troop sponsored Webelos Fun Day

[Buffalo Skipper]

Our troop is considering hosting a Webelos Fun day, for say one morning of inter-pack den competition, followed by lunch.

 

Of course we are looking at using this as a recruiting tool, but I was looking for some feedback on you (as Webelos and/or Troop leaders) feel would be fun and attractive activities for Webelos dens to compete with. Also if you have some thoughts on how the troop can organize and implement this, it would be most welcome.

 

Ideas?

[Eagle92]

I'LD look into the various Webelos Activity badges and come up with events based on those. Or you can give them a taste of Scout activities like basic pioneering. One of my old troop's tricks was divide the Webelos amongst the patrols and let the scouts teach the webs basic lashings. We then had 'Chariot races" as described in the last Green Bar Bill handbook. We've also had guest speakers, specifically the local swat team or search and rescue team come and give a presentation.

[shortridge]

* Look at the T-2-1 requirements and base some activities off them. I'd disagree with Eagle92's suggestion to base the activities on the Webelos pins - that's old hat, and you should be giving them something new to whet their appetites for Boy Scouts.

 

* Try a few wide games.

 

* Outdoor cooking is always a great way to build interest - food always gets people swarming.

 

* Be sure to have plenty of flyers/handouts, photo displays or videos from your recent trips/HA treks, etc.

[Liz]

I don't know how big your troop is or how many Webelos you have attending, but something fun might be to have the patrols compete with each other for training the Webelos in some skill; assign each den to a patrol, have the patrol teach the den something (lashing, making a splint, whatever), and then make the patrol step back and let the den compete for who learned the skill the best. The best den wins, AND the patrol that does the best job at training wins! This has the potential of doing a few things:

1) The patrols will have an incentive to interact directly with the Webelos scouts in a meaningful way.

2) The patrols get to practice the mentoring skills AND the Webelos get a taste of what it's like to be taught skills by older boys, not just adults.

3) It could build a bond between a Webelos den and a patrol in your troop, thereby giving the den a reason to choose your troop over another one (or over ditching Scouts altogether of course).

 

Anyway, it's just a thought. I've never actually tried such a thing. Our boys have fond memories of going to a local Troop when they were Webelos, and competing as if they were a patrol in a first-aid contest -- and winning! I have pictures of all these big tall Boy Scouts standing around and watching the Webelos show them how it's done right! :-)

 

-Liz

[IM_Kathy]

I love Liz's idea of how to run it and award winners.

 

I'd do that with setting up tents, fire building (without lighting - racing for fires often ends badly), first aid splinting, first aid support carries, strecher building and transporting, lashing a tripod, tying knots (square, tautline, two half hitch, and maybe bowline)

 

you could set up a basic orienteering course - have the scouts teach compass skills and get them to learn their pace count. then have them run the course - which ever team gets closest to final point wins.

 

you're serving lunch... what about having the webelos help the boy scouts cook something basic with dutch ovens.

 

[SR540Beaver]

Buff Skipper,

 

Our troop does an (usually) annual Pin Fair each May at the council camp closest to our district. The Pin Fair is for the Webelos Dens in our district and is taught by the boys in our troop. It is an overnighter that starts on Friday night. The troop goes out on Thursday evening and sets up camp so we can hit the ground running on Friday evening. The Webelos and their parents arrive Friday night and set up their tents, have a cracker barrel with us and attend a campfire program we put on for them. We provide breakfast and lunch for them on Saturday and in this instance, it is cooked mostly by the adults since the boys are busy teaching a variety of Webelos pins. If memory serves correctly, I believe we typically teach five different pins and the Webelos sign up for one or two that they want to earn. We are typically thru by 4:00 PM so everyone can get home for dinner. The council camp is on the near outskirts of town. This is purely a recruitment tool for our troop as well as an opportunity at service and skill teaching and leadership experience for our boys. It has been highly successful for us.

[asm 411]

Our Troop does a Webelos Campout every year.

 

For Webelos I dens each patrol works with them on pin requirements. Not the whole pin but requirements that work well for the Den leaders and the patrols. Knots, firestarting, leave no trace, parts of the Scout Badge...

 

For Webelos II dens, who will be Boy Scouts in about 4 months, they get an introduction to Boy Scouts. They learn how to set up the troop tents, learn about cook boxes, help cook lunch( a couple Webelos II with each patrol), learn about duty rosters and menus...

 

We usually have a pioneering project (tower, trebuchet...) going on in which the Webelos II help with and all Webelos get to enjoy.

 

During the campfire program all the Dens and Patrols have skits/songs/run ons... to do.

 

We take the Webelos Parents ( a captured audience as it were ) and go over how Boy Scouts is different than Cub Scouts and what the troop expectations are of parents. We go over the merit badge process, summer camp, troop philosophies...

 

Hope this helps.

[ghermanno]

Buffalo Skipper,

 

If you have the time, and the inclanation, why not sponsor a Webeloree? That opens it up to the whole District (you did say inter-Pack). Takes a little more time in setting up but you can set stations (i.e.: fitness (races/jumps/...) Pioneering (lashes/knots/whittleing chip) ... This way it like a mini Jamboree but events are not as dificult (you are dealing with Cubs, not First Class Scouts) but challenging and some are just for fun.

 

As previously stated, this will also be determined by Troop size and how you will staff (just you Troop or staff from whole district). As a "Distict Event", you may add Archery &/or BB to your Webeloree (you can't for just a local function).

 

Just my $0.02.

 

YiS,

 

Rick

[Buffalo Skipper]

Thank you all for your $.02 and other loose change. Larger donations may be sent directly to the troop.

 

This started because the PLC (and adults) dropped the ball on scheduling a Webelos campout. Our council has Cub Scout and Webelos camping opportunities every weekend from the last week of September to the first week of November. That is followed by the district (or this year, council) camporee. Our troop typically has a warm up hike in December and a longer one in January. This really fills our bucket for this time frame. Next year, I will see that we do not miss our early window of opportunity to reach out to the Webelos with a campout.

 

In the meantime, we are planning for this year. We have a small troop (15 active), so we are limited to what we will be able to deliver. We will be inviting both 4th grade and 5th grade Webelos. I do not want to push the "recruiting" aspect, as we would rather have more dens participate, regardless of their interst in joining our troop.

 

We will probably have some simple events. Our scouts like to do pioneering, so we will likely build a rope bridge as part of a simple obstacle course. We will also have a Scout Law relay, rope toss, tug-of-war, maze, and knot tying as well as other basic competitive events; and of course we will have spirit awards and the like. We are looking at lunch (hamburgers and hotdogs). During lunch we can pitch the troop. We have a good dining facility right by the field we will be using.

 

As the troop grows, we may expand this into something bigger, we will see. We do want to focus on Webelos skills, for several reasons. First, we will be inviting W1, who have just started to hone these skills. Webelos skills are (generically speaking) an introduction to Boy Scout skills, but most importantly they are age appropriate.

 

I will deliver this to the SPL and see how he wants to handle it. I am confident he will breathe good life into the event. In the meantime, feel free to throw any more ideas out there. I will be glad to pitch them.

 

And thanks for all the great suggestions! If we do not implement them all this year, we may well have the chance to use them next time around.

[Buffalo Skipper]

We took some time at a recent meeting to lay the foundation for our "Webelos Fun Day." I had a good ideas of what I thought we should do, but I put it out to the troop for event suggestions. After some discussion, they narrowed it down to these 10:

Obstacle courseFireman's CarryFlag FoldingRope TossTent PitchingScout Law RaceKnot Tying RelayHammer ~n~ NailSkin the Snake          andLift that Weight         as well as:Spirit, and Den Flag Awards

Some of these are timed, others are based on accuracy.  I suggested 2 events (based on equipment I have access to that the scouts were unaware of), but they came up with 15 and made the decisions on which 10 (12) to use.  As we have a fairly small troop (15), each scout has taken one event, and the extras are available as floaters.  We had a camporee a few weeks ago, and they were able to envision many of these events.  With that in mind, they really took ownership of the activity, and are looking forward to putting it on.

As I said earlier, we will provide lunch and do a troop pitch before awards are presented.

I have used my connections to invite "neighborhood" packs (covering maybe 1/4 of the city) to this activity, and so far I have been met with encouraging responses regarding participation.  With Webelos 1 and Webelos 2 dens, we are looking at at least 6 dens coming out, and I still have not heard back from 2 large and 2 small packs.  If things continue to shape up the way they have, it may well be a successful event.

[rjscout]

That sounds like a GREAT time. I hope there are some troops in my area that do something like this next year when my son becomes a Webelos Scout. I may try to use part of your list when we start our Webelos camping in June.

[Buffalo Skipper]

OK, update time. We have commitments from 6 packs with a total of 12 dens which will be participating; we are expecting 60-80 Webelos (4th and 5th grade dens). But I am looking for some advice here, mainly as relates to the recruiting aspect of this.

 

I don't want to turn this into what people perceive as a recruiting event (I would prefer to be more subtle than that). We have "commitments" from maybe 10 scouts who want to join the troop. We would like to recruit 5-8 or so more this year (2 new patrols). We want to pitch the troop at the lunch, but we don't want to make it a hard sell. We want everyone to feel welcome, and not pressured to come to our troop.

 

So, how can we promote the troop without everyone seeing this as a recruiting event. Then how do we follow up with these scouts and their parents? I have little experience with really recruiting Webelos, and our troop has not made an agressive attempt to seek webelos in probably 15 years (and until last year, the troop has been steadily shrinking for that whole time...).

[GKlose]

I have some recent experience with stuff like this...one was an overnight set up for Webelos, and the other was a recent open house for our "feeder pack". There hasn't been much "feeding" lately because of a mis-handled relationship. So as a troop membership chair, I decided that was one of many factors that had to be addressed, including bringing back the annual open house.

 

In both cases, we wanted to stress Scouts having fun. That's probably the single biggest factor -- a "recruit" recognizing a familiar face (having seen them at these events before) and recognizing that this group of kids are friendly and fun. I've also tried to talk to various adults on the side telling them the troop is fairly laid back (which it is) but likes to have fun, and is fairly active.

 

I'm trusting that these events don't need to overtly scream "we're recruiting!". What I've found is that the average Cub parent doesn't know all that much about scouts, probably can't wait to get out of driving back and forth (and staying for) den meetings and pack meetings. They don't necessarily understand that the troop's job is to build a group of young leaders who can function without having adults lead them around from activity to activity.

 

At our open house this last week, I would bet that 90% of the parents there didn't know that the troop has about 20 to 24 active members, and several active, committed adult leaders. While Cubs were tanking up on sugary snackage (which is not a normal thing for the troop), they were also watching a video of some the recent activity with the troop.

 

In all this, I see a couple of really bright spots -- one is a 15-yr-old who hasn't really been involved in troop leadership all that much. He's kind of a harmless, have fun type of wise guy. But on our Webelos overnight, he really stepped up. He patiently helped a small group of Webelos pitch a tarp and tie knots. He was really good with them.

 

I saw it, and complimented him on it later, and then brought it up to the board when he had a BoR a couple months later. He has since volunteered to be a Den Chief, and he was really cool with Cubs again this last week.

 

So I guess my point is that sometime you don't need overt recruiting. Being friendly and having fun is a great sales tool all on it's own.

 

BTW, at the open house I handed out flyers to all parents so that they knew who we are (despite being part of the same CO), what we do for fun, and what the joining stipulations are. That was probably too overt, but I had a specific goal in mind, which is to let everyone know who we are. I'm going to try and pull them in on joint service projects too, this coming spring.

 

Guy

 

[Buffalo Skipper]

Thanks Guy! Sounds like we have same thing in mind--FUN!!!

 

I was looking for some more technical aspects. Do you have a sign up list? Do you follow up with these Cub Scouts and their parents? Do you do the "hard sell" and actually ask them to join (I have done this with adults at Cub Scout open house, with good success)? If you follow up, do you have the committee, SM/ASMs, or boys actually make the calls?

 

We invited the Dens from out Charter partner packs (our charter has 2 packs and 1 troop) to our COH last Monday. We had photos of events from the past year, and I put together a neat closing section with a slide for each scout (with a scout's photo), showing the number camping nights for the year, number of meetings attended, miles hiked, miles canoed, service hours worked and leadership positions served over the course of 2008. It closed with a total number of meetings attended, service hours worked, nights camped, etc.

 

I was thinking we should we do something similar to this slide show for our lunch at Webelos Fun Day, with one of our recent (fromer) SPLs to narrate it. The particular boy I have in mind is in the theatre and is an excellent public speaker. Should I use my best tools in this way? Should we also pass out flyers? Are we being too overt here? The truth is, this year we are not really ready to have too many boys transer in. Even if we recruit 15 total, that will double the size of the troop, though we have taken steps to be prepared for this number.

 

Any other thoughts?

[Mike F]

Buff Skipper,

 

This is an excellent idea - maybe even better than headaches of Webelos Invite campout!

 

My first concern would be size. 60-80 Webelos with 15 Boy Scouts running events is going to stretch you guys pretty thin. You'll probably have to call in adults to help keep crowd moving, but that's OK. You might consider opening this up to other troops, too. Then each troop can run a couple events at once and you can rotate them through.

 

As for the recruiting aspect - of course it's recruiting! With 10 committed incoming before a cool event like this, I'll bet you reach your goal of 15 with no problem, so you don't need to push the hard sell. In fact, there's no way you take in all 30-40 (est.) of the Webelos 2's anyway, so just be really vocal about not just recruiting for your troop - you're recruiting for Boy Scouting. In other words, you want all of those Webelos (and parents) to look forward to crossing over into any of your local troops. In addition to your troop flyer, you should hand out a list of contact information for all the local troops.

 

You could do individual signups and make follow-up calls, but I dont think youll have to. Include troop meeting information on your flyer and tell all interested to drop by some time to see your troop in action and to discuss possible membership.

 

This last bit of advice is very important. Although others will disagree, I think you need to decide right now how many new scouts you can effectively handle. Doubling your size in one year with a bunch of inexperienced, excited 11-yr olds is going to be a challenge. If you get more new guys than you can assimilate, your older scouts and the new guys will suffer. I recommend discussing this with your adult leaders and PLC so you get buy-in from everyone. Decide on a limit and let everyone know about it. Consider setting it a tad lower than you think is your real max to allow room for one or two more when they come to you with a "best buddy who just has to be in scouts with me."

 

Have fun and let us know how it goes!