Cranham Scout Group

2007 marks the one hundredth anniversary (centenary) of Scouting, so it’s going to be a fun-packed year for all the members…

For our first meeting of the new year, we talked to the Beavers about New Year celebrations in different countries by reading them a story, and they played a game (“I Went To the Shop”), where they sit in a circle and each has to list everything the previous player had in their basket, then choose and add a new item of their own – a memory game. Ours was themed along the lines of things one would buy for a New Year party.

Then for the Cubs, we introduced the theme of ‘one hundred years’ by talking about how large a number 100 was (four times my age, twelve or so times theirs…), and then challenging them to do one hundred things within the hour.

The hundred things came from [a list I had prepared](http://www.cranham-scouts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/100-challenges.txt) – all quite simple things, some thought provoking – and we set them all going with their own printed sheet listing the hundred things, while us adults helped when they got stuck and attended to things like reading out questions from the quiz book when required, but this turned out to be a mistake; an increasing number of them started just playing around with the equipment, and I couldn’t keep track of them all while still helping out the ones that *were* trying. Although I was annoyed at them for ceasing to take the exercise seriously, it’s my job to prevent that from happening; they’d become bored of the exercise and just started messing about.

So I asked the handy nearby District Comissioner for advice, and she pointed out that with her group, they split them into two groups, each with one adult, and the adult had gone through the list with their group, reading out the exercises in turn. That way, since they’d all been doing the same thing together at once, they’d had the full attention of the leader to keep them on track, and they’d felt engaged with it as a group activity. Where I’d gone wrong was setting them all on the challenges themselves, so acting in a group with their friends was *competing* with the challenges, and they could easily get away with doing their own thing…

Lesson duly noted – I’ll bear that in mind when planning activities in future!

The scouts had their own one hundred challenge (known, confusingly, as ‘Challenge 100′ rather than ’100 Challenges’ – we didn’t choose the names!) introduced to them. Theirs was more serious, with a published list of challenges, such as circuit training or seeing which team can produce the most bird feeders in ten minutes, with the final results of their live attempt at each challenge sent in, for their chance to win the prize of free entry to the Jamboree later this year. They had a go at a few of the challenges to start practicing, and had a meeting to decide on their own ‘code of conduct’ for the troop.