Emergency Aid and Ruby Robin Award

Yesterday's meeting went well, especially as we had lots of new friends joining us! It was so exciting!

The day kicked off with the Squirrels and Beavers welcoming six new members! River and Florence in the Squirrels and Mason, Leander, Evan and Hugh in the Beavers. They spent their meeting working on one of the staged badges: Emergency Aid.

To achieve it, they pretended they were making 999 calls so they'd know what to do should the need ever arise and why it's important to get help. They learned about the recovery position and how to do it to help people who are unconscious.

Welcoming our new friends!

Gathered around and getting to know each other

Eva and Zach practice the recovery position

Practising the recovery position

Even young people can move adults into the recovery position

Taking turns

More practice

Brian is put into the recovery position by one of his new friends

More practice

In the afternoon, the Cubs and Scouts were taking on their Ruby Robin Award, a challenge set up by the charity Songbird Survival to get young people learning about birds and taking action to help them over the winter.

Our activities chosen from their list were the following:

• Craft & Create: Build a bug hotel

• Learning: Bird word search

• Bird Spot: Sound mapping

• Fun & Fundraising: Bird emoji quiz, colouring sheets

We started by welcoming seven new members: Jacob, Violet-June, Fraser, Milton and Callen into Cubs, and Adelaida and Gabriel to Scouts.

As well as the above activities, we also played Bird Bingo, made bird feeders and played NSEW in the courtyard.

In case you're wondering (I know I was when I first saw the title), sound mapping is where you sit somewhere outside and listen. You have a piece of card with yourself drawn in the middle, then draw images representing what you can hear around you.

The emoji game was great fun too! See how you do with it. (Clue: They're not all types of birds, some are things to do with birds)

1. 🎶🐦

2. ⬛🐦

3. 🟨🔨

4. 🐦🪺

5. ⬛🧢

6. 🐦🍴

7. 🤴🎣

8. 🪺📦

9. 🐦🛁

North, South, East, West!

Creating bug hotels

Poppy adds to her hotel

Hannah and Hathi get creative

Violet and Hannah make friends

Jon and Becky work on their bug hotel

Do you hear what I hear?

Becky continues with her bug hotel

Amelia and Millie work on their bug hotel, with Poppy on the other side of the tree

Gabriel shows Bagheera the sap on a stick

Millie and Amelia work on their bug hotel

Charlie examines an owl pellet

Working hard on the word searches

Sound maps

It was so great to have new friends joining us this week and we'd love to make some more on our next meeting. We even had some new grown ups joining us! A big 4th Gosport welcome to Ian and Anna helping out with Cubs and Scouts. Anna will go by Baloo and Ian has yet to choose a Scout name. If you have questions about joining, whether it's for a young person to sign up or as an adult volunteer, just drop us a line and let us know!