PWD!

It is that special time of year again, pinewood derby time.  Not my favorite event, but who can argue with tradition?  Last year I sort of helped with the trophies.  They were based on the ones you have probably seen online, a wedge shaped block (ours were more of a rectangular block stood on end with a slanted top) with a toy race car spray painted gold on top.  The name of the award and the year were typed and printed and decpoupaged on.  They looked great but required a lot of sawing and sanding.

This year I did tons of internet research (read procrastinating cleaning the house) hoping to find something slightly easier that would also appeal to the boys.  I found these snazzy 5x7" shield plaques at JoAnn Fabric.  I woodburned the writing and another leader painted the cars left over from last year.  I stained them with some Ipswich pine Minwax I had on hand, and added sawtooth picture hangers on the back, and an adhesive bumper at the bottom of each on back. Oh, and they also needed some sanding first to smooth them out.

There are six total: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd fastest which will be based on the race results, and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd best design based on scouts' votes.

My son really wanted to male a creeper car.  I told him it would not be the fastest and probably wouldn't even get best design, but at least he would have a cool looking car that he would like. He was OK with that.

Bear Den Meeting: Building Muscles/What's Cooking

Sorry there is no original image for this entry, though clip art does look better than my photos.  What I have to write is not even geeky (OK maybe it is, who am I to judge?) but it is probably my most important discovery as a scout leader.

When determining what achievements we would cover this year I thought my den would like the two-person contests (which are sort of like wrestling) from Bear achievement 16.  You are supposed to do six of them and I labeled the ones that I thought would be safest and crossed out the ones where I thought it could get too violent (a foot in the face, someone thrown to the floor...just look at the handbook and imagine the WPO).

For whatever reason I decided to do Requirement 9g: cook something outdoors on the same night.  Fire and wrestling--what could go wrong?

Despite my worries this turned out to be a very successful meeting.  This sounds kind of drastic but I determined that the boys will get more out of it if there is some risk involved.  They are going to have more fun, try harder, and even be more careful if there is the possibility of injury, mess, or damage. 

In contrast, last year as a new den leader with 5 Wolves I thought we would have a nice meeting about the American flag.  I did a bunch of research and had a lot of interesting facts to share about our flag which I won't include here because that meeting had more injuries and tears than any other!  The boys were so bored and restless that their behavior was abominable.   It made me change my den meeting structure for the rest of the year (which will hopefully be in a future post) and caused me to fear doing the one on one tests of strength a year later.

Naturally you need to stay within the safe scouting guidelines! However sometimes there is an activity that is recommended for the age group you are leading but you are worried it might still be too risky.  In that case maybe you should try it anyway.  Your scouts might thank you.  Someday.

Wolf Elective 1: It's a secret!

After my den earned their Wolf rank last year we had a meeting where we did elective 1 which  involves invisible ink and secret codes.

I made code books for the boys, though they were not as big a hit as I thought they would be.  One scout in particular was not comfortable with writing a message in code.  Luckily I had also brought a telegraph key (for sending morse code) which had more hands-on appeal, and that went over a bit better with him.

The code books include the pigpen cipher, morse code, pig latin, turkish irish, braille, and a cryptograph wheel.  Most of these can be found in multiple places on the web but I included sources I used for further reference.  Pig latin was by far the most popular of these and I now hear it nearly every day from my son, so be forewarned!  Click here to download a copy of the code book.

For the invisible ink bit I used an electric sandwich maker to reveal the ink.  The Wolf Handbook says to use a light bulb but bulbs do not give off heat like they used to.  I just stuck the page with the lemon juice writing in my heated sandwich press, closed it, and checked it in a couple minutes.  Most of the invisible messages were revealed quite nicely with this method.

After the codes we flipped through the back of the Wolf book and did some of the quicker electives, like measure your hand using inches and centimeters, and say "hello" in another language.  As we looked through the book I asked my scouts what electives they would be interested in doing in our future meetings.  Two that they chose which we spent the most time on were "Let's Have a Party" and "Be an Actor."  They also chose to visit a library, which surprised me for some reason.  I am so glad I asked for their input because we had a blast with the electives they chose and the library meeting was definitely my best den meeting ever at that time.

Bike safety battle mat

Bike Safety Battle Mat

Here is our Crystal Caste mat serving as a hands on bike safety display for our bike rodeo pack meeting.  Much better than the poster that I was originally thinking of making.  I made it by drawing a neighborhood on the mat with Vis a Vis markers, then getting my husband to make the figures.  The images we used are from other sites so I didn't feel comfortable including a template for them here.  He photoshopped them to have a mirror image at the base so you could fold them in half and have the image on both sides.  The images were printed on card stock.  I glued the sides together, trimmed off the excess paper, and stuck the figures in plastic bases.  Our meeting was outside so I used sticky tack to hold the pieces to the board.  They could still be easily rearranged to create various scenarios for discussing bike and pedestrian safety.  All the scouts from Tigers to Webelos seemed to enjoy it.

The ducks are crossing...what would you do?