What is the salt & pepper of your program?

Stags was my patrol!

Every now and then I have a memory flash about stuff we used to do all the time when I was a young scout and I'm not talking about trying to find a coin at a phone booth to call home...

We used to scrum and yell a shout, throw our bag and stave "over there", all the time, before we start a game or run and activity. That took a bit of time, it brought us together as a team and was a constant pain to go fetch the bag and stave from "over there" at the end of it...

Without going into the Patrol System in detail, I would like to focus (and recall from my youth) those elements that supported the identity of our patrols, what made it fun and helped develop and embellish it, even define it.

Just think about it, a patrol has properties even if it doesn't have one single member in it:
It has a flag, a symbol, a shout, a rucksack, a corner, a name, a history, lots of awards, roles and certainly a character. Oh yes, it also has members, it has a PL an APL and Scouts and like a house is a home for a family, this is also true for the patrol, it must feel like a home to it's members but also supply the benefits of the house as a structure.

It is easy to forget those elements of scouting when we concentrate on staple and planned activities that "we must cover" or "work towards", like badges, camp, hikes etc.

We are good organising fund-raising, camp fires, hikes, visits, games and themed activities; but I'm talking about the small things that linger and repeat all the time, the salt and pepper of our camping and scouting lives.

Here's a quick list:

• a patrol shout! haven't heard any patrol going mad loud about starting or finishing an activity yet.
• a patrol totem, stave or beast! where does it go, who wants to have it?
• a patrol bag or box. Who's in charge? what's in it?
• make a gate for camp and other gadgets or pioneering. Why our tent/site is better than yours!
• have a night shift of patrol guards! They want our stuff!
• stories, encourage storytelling as a skill! Tell us, what happened?
• altered lyrics of a song... it's our job to tell them to keep it clean, it's their job to try...
• encourage made up scout-words that mean nothing outside scouting... woggle is a good start!
• keep the ash of the last camp fire to take back home for the next camp. - as a prize?
• fold the flag after flag down - an honour to the scout who helps with ceremony.
• whistle codes - encourage them to use coded whistle signals and they won't think it's a toy.

To extend this list just observe your scouts; what have they developed in their patrol? any nicknames? have they named the totem? the stave? have they developed a way of telling time in a weird way? do they do a dance? do they shout a yell?

If they decide to wear their scout belts with the arrow upside down, it's their thing!

Of course there are limits, some we see and they don't; still, it's their game that we are invited to, common sense can apply of course and if the altered lyrics or the nicknames are offensive we certainly can step in and discuss. They know that and we know that.

You can not plan those things in your program but they are there, they are invisible, heavy and influential, sometimes more than the things we plan and execute. Some develop organically if we encourage them. They actually develop in every child's play when we don't interfere.

And as they develop and pass from one generation to another our troop gains history, culture and legend.

Grab your Compass & your Maps

With so many resources out there, including the scout fact-sheets and the Ordinance Survey guides to map reading and orienteering, there is no need to write the method of working with a compass and a map here; However, as we have now run 2 nights of orienteering I can report the way we have implemented it in our group.

Both nights called the use of a SILVA style compass. Scouts love to wear a compass and they tend to develop an obsession on finding the magnetic North! It is important to build on this and find more uses of this basic tool.

For this we needed to de-construct the complexity of dealing with the map/grid/compass/hike by going out with a map and a compass and working both of them together and trying to deliver all that to lots of scouts at the same time.

So if you have found this direct approach difficult to deliver here is a new suggestion that will fit in your program as it is under 1h 30m each and it focuses only on parts of the whole use.

Night One (indoors). "Lydia's Adventure"
This can be found with a quick Google search under the challenge 100 website or the OSM.

Get challenge100.org.uk BrownseaAdventure here!

It is split in some PDFs a copy for scouts, a copy for the leader and some route cards ready to print and use!

It is basically a desktop, pen and paper exercise. We used Compass and Map to fill in a route card that follows the story of Lydia, a scout leader who went to Brownsea island and somehow got lost.

At this point the magnetic needle of the compass was ignored, we only used the direction of a travel, the index on the rotating disk and the distance/ruler part of the compass. Once our compass was oriented on the map's north we could test the bearings and distance finding the next point and the location of poor Lydia.

We learned about grid references, bearings and the importance of a route card. We discussed the importance of observation and of reading a map rather than looking at it.

Night Two (outdoors). A night walk out on the grid.
We used a compass and a notepad. We also used our scout stave and glow-sticks to aim ahead on our journey.
It would have been easier if we had a sighting compass but a normal compass worked ok too.

This was an exercise on the Grid alone, outdoors; we learned about pacing, bearings and taking notes.
The magnetic needle of the compass came into play; North was where it always is and we just needed to find where everything else lay around us. We only used the direction of travel, the index on the rotating disk but we wrote our pace on a notepad. We drew our own map!

A team of 3 scouts can split the roles to the one who stands as a target for the bearing taking, one who takes the bearing scoping the staff holder and one who paces the distance between the bearing taker and the target. Someone is also responsible on keeping the notes which are basically 3 columns:

e.g. on the notepad we wrote:

#  Bearing        Pace
1. 180 degrees, 50 paces
2. 270 degrees, 75 paces
3. 360 degrees, 20 paces (or just "N")

You can add a note of what you see and other data, time and even weather conditions. If you are confident, say you run this during the day, you can make it a race. The winner can be the one who walks the longest in the shortest time, the one who mapped the whole route more accurately fastest from start to finish or other ideas like that. We run the activity at night so we tried to stay together, give pointers and help figure out the method...

The outcome of this list can turn to a plotted route on paper or the map, all the legs of our hike took no more than an 1h on a dark cold night, enjoyed by all of our scouts.

Conclusion
We took the compass and we used it in simple ways without trying to do all the functions of the compass at once.
The first night we used the map with a compass but no need to read the needle.
The second night we used the compass with the needle again without setting the map (i.e. trying to read one).

This gave us a couple of test runs on how to tackle the map setting and map reading on the grid third and final challenge. Setting the map on the grid, the number 1 requirement to use both is now self evident to all our scouts. Taking accurate bearings, keeping a constant pace, tuning in the environment on the grid and by reading the map. It all clicks as it is previously experienced without making a fuss or a lesson out of all this.

Friendship in Scouting

I want to share my reason why I love training as a scout leader, keep studying the scripts in a way...

I now do a refresher for the wood badge in the Scout Section and doing Module 13, I read this:

"...adults and young people join scouting primarily for the
adventure, fun and friendship, and they leave if they don’t get it."

I love the simplicity of this statement!

In my personal experience, I think most leaders are doing a great job in the adventure part and also in the fun part; I can certainly see that those two areas are significant in our planing and preparation for activities and for the program but what about the friendship?

This is in my mind the most difficult one, queue the Scout Law:

- A scout is friendly and considerate.

According to the law, we scouts, at any given time, must be convinced that our fellow scout is a friend who is concerned about us. In the past there was also the phrase that the scout is a brother to all other scouts; this older wording is still there in essence, if we choose to phrase it so is there for us to use it.

What a challenge! How do we tackle that when we generally see friendships between our young and adult members develop naturally but we also see issues, sometimes even a constant friction between some members.

Here are some thoughts
because I do believe that when we know what to look for it is easier to find it.

We are bound by a promise to keep the scout law, that means that we must make a constant effort to think of a fellow scout as a friend and to be considerate. This is the starting point, we cultivate friendships to a patrol and troop; we don't have relationships to friendships.

A scout believes in the good intentions of others and listens to what his friends, fellow scouts, like or don't like and acts accordingly.

When they resolve any issues between them, then their friendship is hardened, tried and tested.

This can be issues of behaviour or even practical issues; planning an activity, working as a team e.t.c.

So that's exactly what we must encourage to happen; allow them to cultivate friendships between them.

How can we practically do that?

In scout leader minute at the end ceremony, we can remind all that we are friends.

In Scouts own we can use this subject to instil the approach that we start from friendship and build up.

During resolution of issues, encourage the word friend, friendship and concern.

Look and identify a good friendship or gesture and praise it.

Distinguish between bad behaviour and bullying. Bullying is not tolerated and has no space in a friendship and therefore in the troop or pack.

Run a program about friendship, what other friends they have and do they know that all scouts are friends and have consider each-other.

Include this sense of friendship, what friends do and don't do in the code of conduct.