Beavers
New recruits are always made welcome and usually make new friends quickly during their first evening. Every Beaver - and new member - joins one of the four 'Lodges', identified by the colour of their neckerchief woggle. This promotes a healthy spirit of competition and encourages individuals to pull together to achieve goals through teamwork.
The Beavers earn points towards their 'Lodges' through their groups' and their own individual efforts. Many of the activities are undertaken as part of the Beaver/Cub/Scout tradition of earning badges, showing the skills they have acquired during sessions.
The activities they undertake include:
- cooking pizzas and cakes
- making kites, Xmas, Mother's Day cards, etc.
- growing plants from seeds
- talking about other countries and their flags
- painting Easter Eggs
The Beavers also get out and about on trips, which in previous years have included walks to the nearby Millenium Green and farther afield to Blackpool Tower, Leeds Armouries and Alton Towers.
Although the Beavers are too young to go away to camp with the Cubs and Scouts, they can stay overnight as part of the many activities undertaken by the Beaver's group. Both girls and boys can join the Cubs and Scouts, membership of the Beavers however is restricted to boys.
The children moving up from Beavers, soon get the opportunity to try one of the real scouting activities - camping!! Three camps are planned every year, all under canvas plus one indoor camp, held out of season in October. In previous years as part of a District trip, the troop have also camped abroad in France for a week.
One of the areas on which the leaders try to get the cubs to focus, is to learn how to earn and keep the trust of others. This is largely done through the games they play.
The nature of the badges and the what the cubs have to do to qualify for each of them have recently been completely changed and they're now called 'Activity' and 'Challenge' badges. There are now fewer badges than previously, but because the competencies needed to qualify for the new badges are more challenging - and therefore take a little longer to learn - it's more of an achievement when a cub attains the necessary standard and is awarded one of the new badges.
At the beginning of 2003, almost half of the Scouts attending sessions were girls, so the Scouts is definitely not a 'Boys Own' type of group!! Nor is it just about learning to tie knots!!
The training for the many badges includes such wide activities such as:
Scouting of course wouldn't be scouting unless there were camping weekends!! The group get away about every three months and of course it's still the real thing, under canvas!! On one of the camping weekends, the Moorside Troop meet up every year with one of the Troops from Yorkshire. There's also the Friendship Camp, which is a multi-activity event, usually attended by about 90 Scouts.
