Taking part in the Scouting You Shape has always been important to us. As a leaders, we have always aimed the terms activities around achieving challenge badges and ultimately ensuring as many Beavers as possible have the opportunity to achieve their Chief Scout Bronze Award. But we all know; Scouting is youth led and their choices are important. We have been really excited to take part in the new You Shaped program and award badged.

CENTRAL BADGE & PLAN We invited our Beavers to shape our meetings. We asked them if they would like to have their badges as they earned them or to celebrate at the end of the term. We let them choose which they would like to work on during the next term and asked them to think about how to do it.

LEAD We have encouraged our Beavers to run games. This has been quite interesting as due to Covid, most of our games are brand new to them and explanations have at worst been chaotic, but at best lead to new variations in long loved games.

REPRESENT We asked our Beavers what they have really enjoyed doing since we returned to face to face meetings and asked them to write a letter and draw a picture which they sent off to Blue Peter. Fingers crossed for the badges.

Most of our Beavers have now achieved 2, 3 or some all 4 You Shaped badge.

Each term we have a Log Chew & sit down to think about all the things we had been doing. We asked the Beavers to put lots of activities on Post it notes and grade them on a traffic light. Green – fantastic, brilliant, let’s do it again! Yellow – Meh, s’oright… Red – Never, ever again!
You know you’re getting it right as a leader when you get practically everything on the green. There were a few reds… One was a Beaver on a hike – they didn’t like the mud. Another was a lack of hot dogs when we did some fire lighting. We decided our Beavers have high expectations of Scouting!

Many years ago, we asked our Beavers how they would like to raise money for Toilet Twining, a charity enables families overseas living in poverty to have lifesaving loos. My cunning plan was a sponsored walk, but one of the Beavers suggested a sponsored Poo instead where they are sponsored 20p per flush. We love sending the information home to parents. Between us this year, we raised enough money to build a loo in Zambia. I’m pleased to say, that Beaver is doing his DofE volunteering with us now and is suitably embarrassed. The very best ideas come from our Beavers.

Tracy Barrell – Beaver Leader
1^st Woodmancote Beavers (Birch Colony)