Campfires are one of the iconic memories of cub and boy scouting. Learn the best way to craft a great campfire program full of skits songs and run ons for your district event, unit, scout troop or cub pack.
- Campfire program planner (PDF)
- Campfire Ceremonies
- How to Run an Effective Campfire Program
- Collection of over 100 Campfire Skits (Amazon)
- Mystical Fire Flame Colorant (Amazon)
Transcript:
Crafting a campfire program is as much an art as it is a science. There are many layers to its creation.
Starting with the length of the program, you want to make sure that whatever you decide is appropriate for the audience. For cubs obviously you want to make the program a little shorter, and for a boy scout audience it can be a bit longer. A good campfire program lasts about 45 to 60 minutes, but yours may vary base on your audience.
Successful campfire programs are designed in advance.
This gives you the opportunity to balance all the skits, songs and run ons. It also lets you review the content for appropriateness and make sure there are no duplicates.
There is a misconception in the scouting community that there are a set of banned skits that cannot be done at a campfire. This is not true. There is no master list of banned skits. That said, your camp, council or troop may have a set of skits that have been retired for many reasons.
While simply telling a scout or a leader that “that skit is banned” may be expedient, it’s much better to explain why we do not do the skit in question. This helps avoid hurt feelings and makes the decision of what to run, or not, less arbitrary.
As time in the scouting program marches on, the program aims to be age appropriate and in good taste. As always, let the scout oath and law be your guide.
But lets take a look at some of the gray areas to keep in mind as you craft your program.
Racial, ethnic, and gender slurs and vulgarity top the list of the no-fly zone of skits. These are generally in poor taste, can be hurtful to people in the audience and while I’m not the greatest champion of politically correctness, are not family friendly.
Alcohol, or drunkenness.
Excessive violence, especially skits that may cause actual harm in the presentation.
Nudity, showing of underwear is another one. Much of these can be corrected by having the end state with a swimsuit and not a bare bottom.
Water, or getting people wet should also be done with caution, It’s never appropriate to get your audience wet, and getting cast member wet should minimally be done with their knowledge, and usually reserved for older scouts.
Sometimes it’s not what is done, but how it is done.
There is an old chestnut about a director making a movie, and the punch line is that there is no film in the camera. The story unfolds with the camera man trying to tell the director what is going on, and the director doesn’t listen, and so it goes.
Well we had one scout who would relish in this skit, so much so, that each time it was done, it got longer, and longer and unfortunately got more violent each time it was run with him yelling at the camera man, screaming in actuality. After a few campfires of this we needed to reel the scout in, and eventually banned the script in our troop for a while.
When you are balancing all your skits and songs, you want to make sure that whenever possible that you mix long skits with short skits and energetic ones with not so energetic. There is nothing more intolerable than having a series or 3, 4 or 5 kits that are low energy, with young scouts mumbling the words.
People start to get antsy, and even begin to talk in the audience.
Balance those with high energy run ons like the squirrels think I’m nuts.
Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.
I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was running a campfire program.
