Do Beavers do any extra activities?

[redbottleblue]

I've got 2 children, my DD who goes to Brownies and my DS who goes to Beavers. I've noticed that Brownies tend to have a lot of extra things they do such as trips out (park, cinema, local landmark visits, camping trips), so they aren't just in a church hall every week. Whereas my son has been going to Beavers for a few months now and they don't do anything except stay in the church hall. They do various activities while there but I can tell my son is getting a bit bored. Is this normal for Beavers? I'm wondering if I should look around at other groups

Beavers isn't just for boys though. All the units near me are mixed. Are there really no girls in your son's Beaver group?

Yes it's advertised as a mixed group. However there's only one girl and the energy levels of them all are quite something. They have a lot of leaders each week (maybe about 6) compared to the Brownies who tend to only have a couple of ladies.

From the subject line, I thought you meant the animals. Like, do they have any extracurricular activities for after they’ve finished making dams? Admittedly I just woke up from a nap. 🦫 🦫

A few of our Cubs in particular can be pretty feral, but that doesn't stop the activities. We just paired up extra parent volunteers for outside activities ready for any mild quashing of youthful over exuberance. That does admittedly mean extra volunteers for anything involving a walk from A to B.

My DD used to run a Beavers groups, as well as working and bringing up 2 children. After a few years she gave it up as she was exhausted, not just by the actual time taken at meetings but by: preparation, training, meeting safeguarding and other rules, dealing with children with behavioural problems (without information and support in the way there is in school), raising money, paying bills, dealing with demanding parents ..........

I'm not being funny but honestly if you feel there need to be more activities (for the benefit of all the children) then suggest what might be good and offer to organise it.

I thought it might be great if a group I belong to could go on coach trips to concerts, so I took responsibility for organising these.

Our experience was the opposite. My older daughter went to Brownies and they didn’t do many extra activities at all. It was mostly sessions in the church hall.

I’ve heard about other, more active Brownie groups too.

My younger DD went to Beavers and stayed on for Cubs and now Scouts. I wish I had known about it earlier. They do many more activities besides the weekly sessions.

It just depends on who is running it, their resources and capacity. I am in awe of how much effort and energy our volunteer leaders put in to it.

I was a Cub leader for 6 years until about 3 years ago (I am now an Explorer leader). Some context around activities away from the hut:
1 - cost - I had a budget of 75p per head per week in Cubs, and less now. We are discouraged by the GSL to arrange trip that required additional payment more than once a year, due to the demographic of the group.

2- Volunteers - Leaving the scout hut requires more adults. Whenever I tried to schedule a trip out, even with a term’s notice, even walking distance,
miraculously every parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt,older sibling, and every other adult connected to my Cubs was busy.

3- Time - Our Beaver only meet for an hour, our Cubs for 1.5 hours. That can be pretty limiting.

4- Authorisation - the Scout Association is pretty strict about what you can do with/without various levels of qualification for eg, hillwalking or night away.

5- Our volunteers also have families (young and old) to care for and paid jobs to do - by chance the 2 I currently work with all work shifts, which makes scheduling anything at all challenging at times!

We do have a group camp in the summer, and various section camps throughout the year.

I've also been left with beavers at the end of the session with parents forgetting the time to pick their chicken up.. making me late to then collect my own children and in one case I was late to take mine to their own club as a dad turned up an hour late and didn't answer the phone when we called them.

ours go camping, do sleepovers, hiking, do watersports, trips and visits.

it all depends on the volunteers and so if you aren’t getting what you want either volunteer or change groups

PS girls have been in Beavers for decades now

Yes ours do loads. Sometimes the squirrels and beavers meet up with the cubs and they have movie evenings with pyjamas and popcorn too, which I think is cute.

@redbottleblue Scout groups are often looking for volunteers so if you have ideas of other things they could be doing you could join and offer to organise it.

Yup. Had a park trip with scooters/bikes in the summer, a trip to a local vintage arcade games place, laser tag twice, trip to a local castle and they go on camps a couple of times a year.

Surely you should compare Brownies with Cubs and Beavers with Rainbows? They are little in Beavers, surely they do more when they are old enough for Cubs?

I think it's a fair question to compare what different units do across the same age groups though and fair enough to start a thread on it and it doesn't mean that you are ungrateful or need to set up a unit yourself for merely asking a question!

You are moaning.

Offer to help.

They need very high levels parental involvement in order to anything outside the hall. It's the most prohibitive factor.

Not enough adults = a more limited programme.

Maybe the leaders could do more with more help ? Volunteer

I noticed this with my dd when she was in Rainbows. Every week, craft inside. The leaders were very strict too, for instance if she had a sniffly nose, they made her sit away from the kids that were doing the activities and my DD was told to watch. That was the last straw for me. So she left Rainbows & joined a different brownie group in another area who are much more proactive. They don’t do camping/overnight trips but they do a chip walk, visits to cinema/panto/fire stations etc, plus a couple of meets at local girl guides centre where they can use the climbing wall etc.

It really is down to the individual leaders & how much effort they put in. I then found out loads of kids left the original group because of the leaders and they found it boring and it’s now been disbanded.

Unfortunately, you don’t really understand this until they join and do their promise.