Scout Meeting 29th January
We had an almost full meeting tonight. Two people were missing. Ellie form the Cobra Patrol and Brendan from the Leaders Patrol ; 0 )
Brendan was attending a meeting for the County Campcraft Competition, which we will be entering next year for sure. Our PLs & APLs will be attending the competition for a night at Easter this year to see how it all works and so the
y can start to prepare for next year. No pressure there then!!!!
After our Opening Ceremony we played a very enthusiastic game of Dodgeball which everyone really got into. It was a great energy release and everyone was raring to crack on with our Pioneering work.
This week the Jaguar Patrol were making tripods. The Raven Patrol were working on Square Lashings and the Cobra Patrol were building with Bamboo. We got some new Gadget Poles this evening, which made the lashings a bit easier to tie. They are nice an smooth. In the middle of this activity, Brendan showed up. The County Camp meeting didn’t take as long as expected. After our Patrol Leaders Council on Tuesday night, it was great to see the 3 PLs taking control and helping the younger members of their patrols with the work they had to do. The Patrol System is really starting to shine through now.
When we had finished the Pioneering work, Ciaran gave the scouts a challenge. He wanted them to tie a knot in a piece of rope without them letting go of the rope or shifting their hands along it. There is a trick to it, of course and some of the scouts nearly figured it out, but Ciaran had to show them how to do it in the end. They we tried a different challenge. All of the scouts held a long rope as if about to compete in a tug o war. Their challenge was to tie a knot in the rope between the two opposing teams. It takes a lot of teamwork and communication to complete this simple task so naturally we didn’t get it done. But we will some day.
Before we finished off the meeting, we handed out various badges to the scouts. First we gave out the PL and APL badges. This is a big deal for our scouts as being a Patrol Leader or Assistant Patrol Leader is a lot of responsibility and scouts should respect these positions. Well Done to Emma and Adam form the Jaguar Patrol, Ella and Jessica from the Raven Patrol, and Aoife and Luke from the Cobra Patrol. We also gave out Patrol Badges, Discovery Badges and Air Stage 1 Adventure Skills Badges to all who had earned them. It will be great to see them on their uniforms next week. We will soon have our new 89th Bremore Scout Group badge and our Fingal Scout County badges.
We asked the scouts who are hiking (16 of them) this weeknd, to stay back after the meeting finished for a briefing. It has been snowing a lot and they are not very experienced hikers so we wanted to make sure that they understood what the conditions would be like and to prepare for them. We also gave the start and end times to their parents and asked them to make sure that the scouts were well prepared.
It’s going to be a beautiful hike in the Dublin Mountains.
More about that in the next post.
