I didn’t have a chance to blog it last night, but it was my first official Pack Meeting as Cubmaster. My debut was helped by 2 things: one, with the graduation of our WEBELOS II Scouts we now have a small group and two, we had a presenter who end up taking up the bulk of the night. It’s always nice to be able to delegate.
So basically, I had an opening talk where I discussed this month’s Scouting core value of “compassion.” In all, probably the weakest part of what I did. One of the things I learned early on in the Den meetings is to try to not stand up and talk to the kids for too long. The kids don’t have a long enough attention span and standing up there discussing something like “compassion” just doesn’t hit their hot button. That said, I’m supposed to do my best and I kept it as brief as possible.
From there, our presenter for the night got to work. The Pack received it’s new charter and also received and award for the effort we put forth in promoting Scouting in our town. I had the previous Cubmaster on hand to receive the awards and charter because she had done most of the work in getting that stuff done. It was only right that she be recognized for her efforts.
After that, there was a fundraising sort of presentation. It’s one of those obligatory presentations that our local Council gives to all the Packs in the area. It actually has little to do with the kids and is aimed more at the parents, since they have the checkbooks. But the kids were real good and we were making good time, so I decided to reward them with a break to play a game.
The game was to work with a partner to carry 2 balloons across the room. This task proved more difficult than expected, mostly because the kids all just wanted to shoot across the room with their own balloon tucked under there chin but without their partner. The balloons served as a nice distraction all by themselves after the activity was over.
We then talked about the Summer Camps for scouting. This ended up taking a little longer than I anticipated, probably because I ended up talking quite a bit about how much fun the camp is to attend. Of course, I also ended up with a lot more to do since I have to coordinate the Camp for the Pack now.
The evening ended with some awards and rank badge presentations. A new Tiger Scout had earned his Bobcat badge, so I presented that to him, complete with a little speech about what he’d learned. Then I had the other Tigers come up so I could present them with their new Wolf neckerchiefs, since they had all crossed over previously at our Blue and Gold. The final award presentation was some Belt Loops that one of my Wolf Scouts had earned.
With that, I announced a couple of our upcoming events and closed the meeting. So not too bad, in all. I think for future pack meetings, I’d like to keep them more on the fun and active side. I’ve had some ideas about game nights and a bike rodeo or bike Spring-tuneup type theme. We’ve only got a couple more meetings to go for this school year though, so some of those ideas will have to wait.