North Mymms Scout Troop

Tower

nmscouts — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:57:15 +0000

What I was going to do for one of my scout meetings this week didn’t quite work out how I had hoped, so in a quick change of plan we opted for an old favourite of mine – building a tower.

We are lucky that in our scout HQ we have got open beams across the ceiling which allows us to pioneer poles to them. So up went three poles and following a quick bit of instruction we got the scouts to lash horizontal poles between them, getting steadily higher (For those of you who like risk assessments you should be able to make out the mattresses on the floor in case anyone slips!)

We have lots of mattresses in our HQ which have been donated to us over the past few years so once we had built up high enough, we put around 20 mattresses down to make a landing pit five deep by four – and then spent a happy 15 minutes jumping off onto them!

Snowboarding

nmscouts — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:09:20 +0000

Another day, another trip up the M1… Back to Milton Keynes we went to have our next snowboarding lesson. A novel feature of this one was that the scouts actually learnt to come downhill forwards instead of backwards and some of them are beginning to link their turns together. One more session next month will hopefully see them progress enough to be allowed onto the main slope!

Pinewood Derby

nmscouts — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:30:33 +0000

We held the first of our Pinewood Derby races today. It was great to see the time that some of the young people had put into building their cars and painting them etc – there were lots of different designs and ideas. There were prizes for the fastest cars and the best designs. Our thanks go to Aspley Guise Scouts for lending us their track complete with very funky electronic scoring system!

Fires

nmscouts — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:30:00 +0000

Nice simple scout meeting tonight. Light fires, cook sausages on sticks. I am sure this scene is replicated weekly up and down the country – and has been for the last 100 years or so. And the young people are still as fascinated by it as they were last century as well!I had just my younger scouts tonight – all of whom have only been scouts for around six months – for several it was the first time cooking on an open fire. (We have cooked several times with this group before, but always on gas). We learnt several things about how to get fires going (and how wet leaves really don’t work) and how it is better to cook on the embers rather than the flames etc.

Snowboarding

nmscouts — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:38:45 +0000

We were planning on going snowboarding today. With the weather outside a balmy 9C and not a snowflake in site, this could have proved difficult – thankfully about 45 minutes away from us is Xscape. So 14 scouts headed up there for a beginners snowboarding lesson. Once the nightmare of sorting boards, waterproofs, boots, helmets and gloves was sorted out, we headed up to their beginners slope and then had an enjoyable two hours – spent mostly falling over! It takes scouts about three sessions (2 hours each) to get to a standard where they are able to come down a slope without hurting either themselves or anyone else so we will be returning with some of the more hardy souls next week for the next lesson….

Caving

nmscouts — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:17:40 +0000

We spent a long day today travelling from Hertfordshire to Matlock Bath to try caving. A stupidly early start saw us arriving at Matlock Bath Train station where after a short walk we met with Mark, our instructor. After kitting up, Mark lead us most of the way up the Heights of Abraham (by foot not cable car much to the scouts disgust!) before entering an old mine shaft underneath the hill. Exploring the system proved interesting as it was a mix of passages dug out by the miners and more natural cave like features. It also proved to be a complete rabbit warren and when Mark challenged the group to find the way out we had come in – after about 20 minutes we were forced to admit defeat and ask for his help!

After lunch we went to a different caving system around two miles away which involved a lot more underground climbing than the last one. The young people did really well as it is quite different to be climbing up a wall when you are being squeezed against the ceiling underground as opposed to being outside on a natural wall!A brisk walk back down to Matlock followed by a long train journey back to Hertfordshire followed. And, for the first time for a long time, all the trains behaved themselves meaning we arrived back exactly when we should have done!

Pinewood Derby

nmscouts — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:27:47 +0000

At the meetings this week we have been spending a bit of time starting work on our cars for our Pinewood Derby. This is the first time we have ever tried anything like this so it will be interesting to see how it goes! The scouts had some time in the meeting tonight to start making the car, and the idea is that they take the cars home to finish it before we race at a meeting in the future.

Cycle Camp

nmscouts — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:04:26 +0000

We like cycling in our troop. We fairly often go to Chicksands, an offroad cycle venue near Bedford, so decided to make a weekend of it.We spent Saturday at Woburn Sands near Milton Keynes before retiring to Aspley Guise Scouts who kindly lent us their scout HQ for the evening.Our plan of going to Aston Hill on the Sunday had to be changed – on the grounds they had inconsiderately closed it! – so we went back to Chicksands and spent a happy day jumping there as well.

There are more photos on our Photo website.

First Aid

nmscouts — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:34:44 +0000

Paramedics from London Ambulance Service kindly gave up some of their free time in the evenings recently to come and teach the scouts about CPR and associated life saving activities. As well as learning loads about saving people’s lives, the scouts had a great time trying tying each other onto an emergency stretcher!