Merit Badges done during Troop mettings

[AlphaCentauri]

Sure sounds different from Girl Scouts! The Girl Scout badges are complicated and many are extremely difficult for a girl to do without either parental help or the troop participating together. Badges may involve participating in a group activity. Or they may involve interviewing an adult stranger -- it's not real appropriate for 9-11 year old girls to be calling a newspaper reporter themselves to ask what his typical day is like and how much he is paid (an actual requirement). The problem is that the girls dread getting halfway through the requirements for a badge and feeling obligated to do the rest on their own. I swear they have more fun if we don't tell them an activity satisfies any badge requirements.

 

I'm halfway tempted to encourage the girls to go for Boy Scout or Girl Guide badges, which are more straightforward and focused.

 

Of course Girl Scout meetings don't have the same focus on leadership development since older and younger girls are segregated into different troops by the age requirements for Brownie, Junior, Cadette and Senior Girl Scouts.

[Bob White]

Packsaddle wrote "Bob White, you stated, "The Council and District can only make training and support available the quality of the program rests in the hands of the integrity of the individual leader."

I quite agree up to the point where the Council and District DO NOT "make training and support available"."

 

I'm sorry to here that packsaddle but understand that is not a BSA program problem, that is a local volunteer responsibility and if your friends and neighbors in scouting are not doing the job then that is a shame. It certainly is not true in the District and council I serve and I would bet not a problem in most.

 

It makes a leaders job much more self reliant but does not excuse the leader from not following the SM handbok and the Boy Scout handbook.

 

I would go to a council executive meeting and shake some people up.

 

Bob White

[troop_358_potlatch]

Our troop does 2 merit badges a year during meetings. One is the first aid, as our district has a first aid meet every March. So this one is pretty much for the new scouts to earn. All the boys do a review on it in preparation for the meet. They do one of the citizenship ones in the fall.All other merit badges are to be be earned either at camp or at the pace the boys want to earn them. At camp we only encourage the boys to take 2 or 3.

[beaver1onit]

I want to thank all of you for your input. I too have been copying the post. Training is the whole ball of wax and without it your scouting experience can be very diffcult. Luckily my district has been keeping good training records and the training chairman updates them 2 or 3 times a year, we then see what cub and scout leaders are trained, also the ones who are not. The district training committee has training available two or three times during the year but you still get a few who will not take the time and the boys suffer for it. I myself will be going back thru cub training next month because of all the changes coming next year.The new books are really neat. The change was long over due.

[AnneinMpls]

Hi Alpha! Neat to see you hanging out in this forum too I think perhaps there's more than a few of us Venusian beauties picking the brains here for use in our Girl Scout troops - and the natives here appear friendly and patient

You are dead on when you say the GS program lacks the opportunity for leadership development by breaking the program up into 3 year spans (and, truthfully, most GS troops break it up even further into 1 year groupings!). I'm feeling better and better about deciding to do a combined Junior-Cadette troop (4th thru 9th grades). When my bridging 4th graders came in and sat down with the 7th & 8th graders at the table, they did their best to sit up realllllllllly tall So I think with this configuration we'll be doing well.

More to the point of this thread specifically, I have seen an awful lot of GS troops that are badge mills/try-it mills - well, what else are you going to do when you have a group of all girls the same age - looks and feels like a typical classroom setting to me. I do like the idea of using merit badge materials to support themed activity in the troop's program - the youth get a taste of a new area of interest, and if it's something they find they like or are motivated to do (for rank advancement, etc.) they can take it further. I guess my biggest question is, within the boy-led/girl-planning model, how do we encourage broader interests? We *could* just generate a bunch of ideas ourselves as the leaders out of our vast experience (ahem). Do the "simpler" more basic scouting experiences (pitch tents, cook smores, etc.) contribute to increasing/expanding interests? I think sometimes we as leaders don't have enough trust in the youth's motivation to grow - this is something I continually come back to in my own preparation for working with kids (rather than putting on a program for them).

Kinda rambling thoughts tonight, if they can even be called that! Might be short on oxygen - my asthma's acting up...

Peace out,

Anne in Mpls