Theme Oriented Meeting Plan

Here is the secondof my two meeting plans. The point of both is to provide my lesson plan for meetings. While preparing this plan for posting I realized that some of meetings outlined may be a little jam-packed. I run an hour-and-a-half meeting and a couple of these may push that time a little based on how I normally present the topics. If you follow this plan you may have to be a little strict on staying on topic to get through all of the items. As always, though, this is just my opinion based on how I do things. Mix it up and do it your own way.

This particular meeting plan is designed to collect similar activities into one block of meetings. For example, first-aid requirements are spread throughout all three ranks. This plan collects all of those requirements into one block of meetings. The benefit of following this type of plan is that you are covering the same type of thing for multiple meetings in a row. This could help your Scouts' retention capability. The downside of this type of plan is that requirements from all of the ranks are being worked on simultaneously. The net effect of this is that your Scouts won't receive rank advancements until they are completely done with one cycle of your program. And they will most likely receive all three rank advancements in one court of honor. This isn't necessarily bad, it just means that the Scouts won't really see their progress as they move through your program.

I should probably note that I no longer follow this plan (even though I developed it.) I used it for several years and it worked fine, but I found that parents were complaining about their son not receiving any awards every Court of Honor. I now follow my "Rank-Oriented Meeting Plan" and that gives more incremental recognition.

11 Year Old Scout Theme-Oriented Plan

Read More →

Rank Oriented Meeting Plan

Here is the first of my two meeting plans. The point of both is to provide my lesson plan for meetings. The combination of activities for a meeting seem to work well for my teaching style and I typically don't run over my hour-and-a-half meeting length.

This particular meeting plan is designed to take the Scouts through the rank requirements in chronological order. This means that, for the most part, all of the requirements for one rank are completed prior to addressing any requirements for the next rank. I think the only time I deviate from that is where the swimming requirements are concerned. There are swimming requirements in both Second and First Class and I didn't want to schedule two swimming activities only a few weeks apart.

11 Year Old Scout Rank-Oriented Plan

Read More →