The tradition of ending a scout meeting with the ScoutMaster minute and what it means to the scouts and the program.
Show Notes:
- The Scoutmaster Minute: Your Handbook for Inspiring Moments (Amazon)
- Scoutmaster’s Minutes: A collection of Scoutmaster’s Minutes (Amazon)
- Boy Scout Trail: Scoutmaster minutes.
- Scoutorama: Scouter Minutes Archive.
- Bryan on Scouting: 10 memorable ways to pump up your Scoutmaster’s or Cubmaster’s Minute.
Transcript:
Every week I do a scoutmaster minute. This is where I get up in front of the troop at the end of the meeting, I relate the upcoming events, and follow it with the last word of the week.
This is usually a story relating to some part of the scout oath or the scout law.
There are some great resources, some of which I included in the show notes, and sometimes I’ll write my own.
Relating things to current events in the troop or calendar events is also good, but I find the best ones, the ones the scouts really relate to are the stories.
It’s easy to use this time to admonish the boys for some indiscretion, and in actually I have great one about scurvy and why it’s a good idea to buy fruit to bring on the trip, but the main purpose of these is to inspire the boys and have them leave the meeting with a good feeling.
It’s one of the reasons I make it the last thing we do, other than the service patrol closing out the meeting with the oath or law.
This is one of the things that I picked up when I attended Woodbadge, and it really stuck with me.
It sets the tone to how I like meeting run, even if the boys, or even the adults in attendance, don’t understand why I’m doing it, I feel that the weekly repetition of this enforces the values of scouting.
In essence I keep it short, under 3 minutes, about half as long as these videocasts, and includes some lesson to be learned, and if possible, ends with a “gotcha” type of moment concluding the story.
This year I have tried something new, writing 12 new ones, with practical expansions, one for each point of the scout law, which this year has saved me from writing or finding them the morning of the meeting.
I’ve also tries recycling the oldest ones, but to their credit one or two of the boys, who were some of the youngest when I began doing the scoutmaster minutes were pretty vocal about having heard them before, so I’ve stopped that,
I guess its good that they are really listening. But this is what works for us.
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 the Scoutmaster Minute.
