Pack Meeting: Camping 411 – Improv Scouter

At our leaders meeting last week, we were discussing what should be our theme for this month’s pack meeting. It came about that we have many new families and they all have questions about camping. A parent that joined us last year said that they wished they had the opportunity to ask more questions before they went camping. So, Camping 411 became our theme.

I remembered back about two years ago we did a program where it was bad things done at a campsite. Since I save everything, I found it on my laptop as a pack meeting plan for “thrifty” (available from the BSA). So I made a list of the “right way, wrong way” campsites. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to put everything together, so I grabbed what I could easily get my hands on a home and threw it into the car for the set up. (Side note: props to the Target dollar bins for some of these items I purchased over the summer that came in handy tonight.)

So for our Pack meeting, we split the Cubs outside with den leaders to do the scavenger hunt (I asked them to divide into multiple teams so each team had members from various dens) while my two assistant Cubmasters and I stayed inside to answer questions from the parents. I provided a checklist handout with Cub camping basics, a shorter summary from the two pages I put in our new parent guides for open house (links to those at the bottom of this blog).

At the end of the scavenger hunt, I had the leaders hand out Outdoor Code cards and read them with all the Cubs.