Scout Meeting 13th November

Despite the heavy rain and flooding all day we had a great meeting with 20 Scouts on the night. Brendan one of our leaders couldn’t be there as he was at a county meeting planning the ‘County Shield’ for early next year but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t hear from him during the meeting, more of that later.

At the start of the meeting the call was given for scouts to fall into their patrols and salute the flag, the scouts also recited their charter which is now an important part of our meetings. The charter is framed and at every meeting to remind us of the promises we all made to each other and the group.

We took advantage of a brief break from rain and headed outside for our first game, ‘Balloon Popping’. The PL’s gave each of the scouts in their section two balloons and two elastic bands. The general idea was that each scout had a balloon attached to their ankles with the elastic bands. Chaos then followed as the scouts ran around trying to pop the balloons of scouts in different patrols. At the end of the game the Raven patrol were victorious with quite a number of them still having two balloons intact. After the game was finished all of the scouts cleaned up the burst balloons, remember ‘Leave No Trace’.

When we were back inside Fiona went over the ‘promise’ which all scouts will recite at our group investiture on 30th November. There are two different variations of the promise and it was left open to the scouts to choose which they wanted to recite on the day. We were reminded of one of the words of our charter ‘Respect’ and the fact that we recognise that it is a personal choice for people.

We did say at the start that we heard from Brendan during the meeting. We played a recording that Brendan had made of a suggested group chant or yell. Alan explained to the scouts that at the investiture we would have to do a ‘party piece’ that could either be a song, a short sketch or possible the ‘Bremore Yell’. In a fine exercise of democracy the scouts were asked to vote for their preference and by a narrow margin the yell was chosen. We decided in his absence that Brendan would lead rehearsals next week.

Next we split back up into patrols and Fiona, Ciaran & Alan sat with a patrol each to discuss the patrol meetings that were arranged during the week. There were some teething problems with getting everyone organised but the patrols all agreed that it was a good idea to try and meet up between scout meetings and come with ideas for things that they would like the scouts to do.

On to another game and Ciaran utilised ‘bivvy bags’ to play ‘Stretcher Races’ with the scouts and it was a huge success. The game was a prelude to some badgework, this time the emergencies badge. Ciaran with the aid of the adventure skills book which will shortly be given to all scouts explained what was involved in the emergencies badge, stage 1. As you can see from the photography the scouts were hanging on his every word.

The time came to draw the meeting to a close and Ciaran and Fiona did some work with the scouts on ‘drills’ Ciaran demonstrated the correct stance for ‘Scouts Alert’ and ‘Scouts at Ease’ and also how to correctly salute the flag. The end of another enjoyable evening