Planning Skills Weekend, Part 3

Our skills weekend was coming together well because I knew we had some good learning activities to fill the day, and enough adult help to make it all work well (as I wrote in Parts 1 and 2). Another important part to make the weekend exciting is having some fun activities, too.

Cooking Pancakes

Cooking Pancakes is a game I came up with last year for the Skills Showdown. Unfortunately, a lack of firewood made it easy for us to skip that activity!

This game is more than just a fire-building competition. Teams need to build a fire, mix batter, cook and eat pancakes! That will require quite a bit of teamwork and planning, as well as some fire-building skill. Scouts need to be able to keep a fire burning while cooking their pancakes, which should make it much more difficult than the typical “burn through the string” competition.

Crazy Relay Race

This one is just plain fun! An overview is very simple: Patrols line up, and the first Scout from each Patrol runs across the field to blindly draw a task out of a bag, then runs back to his Patrol where he must complete the task. Each Scout goes in turn.

Here’s the trick: each task in the relay race is… well, crazy. Do the chicken dance, eat a jar of baby food, and say the alphabet backwards. Some are a little more elaborate: put on another Scout’s shoes, tie the laces together, and run across the field and back. You can download a PDF of the tasks to play with your Troop: crazy-relay-race.pdf. I’d be interested to hear what sort of crazy tasks you add to it!