Camp Opemikon

Here is a fun relay game that I came up with to play with the Beavers at Camp Opemikon this past weekend. In a slightly altered form it would be appropriate for just about any aged Scout. At this age it is best to do as a father-and-son relay (or "parent-and-child" if your colony has girls). For older kids you could do real races with heats down to first, second and third place. For Beavers it was not really about winning - just about having fun. The fathers did a lot of the work, but we encouraged them to try as much as possible to just help the Beaver do it himself, and then only do it after a good effort was given. And in the end we did not really keep track of who finished first - but rather, we made sure to give each boy kudos in some way or another. e.g. in each heat one boy would get "furthest distance", another would get "closest to the mark", and another might get "straightest cast".

For Beaver age kids you start out with a rod and reel for each team in the heat - we did 3 at a time. The reel is already attached to the rod, and strung with fishing line, but the line is not strung through the eyes in the rod, and there is no tackle on the end of the line. For older kids you may want to consider having them start with the reel not yet attached to the rod, and have them attach it. Or even go so far as to have them string the reel with line first, and then attach it to the rod. For Beavers it was enough to just have them string the line through the eyes in the rod. Beforehand we showed the fathers how to tie a fisherman's knot.

This weekend we took our Beaver Colony (ages 5 through 7, with some 8 year olds depending on birthdates) to Camp Opemikon - arrived Friday evening and left this morning. I have a lot more to write about our trip, but for the moment I only want to scribe a bit about the Compass Challenge that I came up with as an activity for the boys. Earlier this year we did a bit of compass work with the boys - but at this age anything too complicated can be hit-and-miss. A few of the older boys got it no problem, so I wanted to take the opportunity to do an exercise on compass work while we were at camp. This was my first time at Opemikon, so there was not much I was able to do in advance to prepare for it Hopefully this article will be useful to someone else in my position, in the future.

One of the things I've been trying to do this year is have activities that the older boys can learn quickly and then teach to the younger ones. Scouting is supposed to be in part about leadership, and I think this is a good way to try to teach it to the boys. It is also a useful tool because the other boys seem to behave better when it is one of their peers trying to lead them through an activity, so it is also a bit self-serving. We had about 90 minutes of free time in the program first thing Saturday morning, so I took my 2 boys on a walk through the woods to map out a course. My oldest son is 8 and is a "silver tail" Beaver, which means he is actually of Cub age but still going to beavers. In our case our troop does not have Cubs because we did not have enough interest this year at that age. My son should have "swum up" to cubs about 2 months ago. In any case I lead them through a quick 15 minute course, taking notes as we went along. I then found the other 3 silver tails in our colony and lead them each through it 1 by 1, in most cases with their father tagging along. 2 of the 4 boys got it right away, and later went on to do a very good job of leading their peers through the course, explaining things to them as they went along. As I told the Silvers when I was showing them the course, I did not want them to give the answers to the other Beavers, but rather wanted them to help the other Beavers find the answers themselves.