Beaver Scouts faith badge - ideas please

[JammySplodger]

I'm one of the leaders at our local Beaver Scouts. We're going to be sitting down over the Christmas hols to drink lots of wine plan our activities for our Beaver group next term so I've been looking at the badges for ideas of what we can work towards.

I was wondering what everyone's done for the Faith badge and if you could throw some ideas our way. We're not attached to any church but things do seem to centre round Christain beliefs quite alot, so I thought it could be good to find out about a wider range of religions / spiritual beliefs, in a way that'll be interesting for a large bunch of 6-8 year olds.

I have no idea where to start with approaching various faith organisations for a possible visit to a place of worship. We're in quite a multi-cultural city and I know there's a mosque not too far away, I assume there will be a temple, synagogue, etc somewhere too. I've only ever been in Catholic & CofE churches and I don't really know how to approach this.

Also, if anyone has any suggestions for activities related to regilious events, that would be great - we can always work on this badge later on next year if it would fit with various celebrations better.

For reference, the badge requirements are:

1.Write a prayer or reflection.

2.Read or share a prayer at the opening or closing ceremony or some other time.

3.Find and tell a story that relates to the Beaver Scout Promise.

4.Visit a place of worship and show evidence of your visit with photographs, drawings, handouts, leaflets or information sheets.

Under item 3, it would be appropriate to use a book specifically written for 6-8 year olds that contains either religious or moral stories that relate to the Promise.

In Brownies, we actually asked some local religious leaders to come to us. We had a catholic priest, a Mulsim and someone from the local Sikh temple. The Sikh temple welcomes visitors (as do most religious places actually), but we meet on Fridays, and this isn't practical for them.

Given the age of the Beavers, perhaps you could write a group story/poem where everyone contributes a line?

(I never reply did I, how rude)

Thanks, I might suggest we ask someone in, though we have a good number of leaders now and lots of supporting parents so taking 25 children on a trip out to somewhere they need to be reasonably sensible could be manageable. We meet on a Monday too so that should hopefully not conflict too much.

I thought, seeing a we have some who are quite poor writers, we could do a big collage or fresco on a long strip of backing paper and pin it up at the hut entrance for the parents to see.

The collage thing is a good idea. Do you meet somewhere where you could leave it up for a while? If not, they could make small collages which they could take home.

We have a lovely big scout hut and plenty of wall space so we could definitely leave it up for a while, or even add to it - ooh, maybe we could do one throughout the year and add on a section for a major festival for the main religions.

We could include Easter/Christmas, Eid (which I need to find out more about), Diwali, others I also need to look up, even the sumer solstice given there are some ancient stone circles in the hills near us. Something to consider over a glass of wine or two I think.