Hi all! Porterstown Venture Section here, welcome to the 1st Porterstown newsletter of the 2023 Scouting Year. Below, we will tell you all about what each section has been up to over the last few weeks. We aim to share a newsletter with you each month! We hope you enjoy.
Monday Beavers:
Monday beavers are back! Last September we had a super group camp at Lilliput. More than 90 youth members and adults attended. It was great to see new friendships formed between sections and leaders. We have spent the last few weeks making new friends, planning ahead, setting up rules and having fun with the old and new beavers.
Tuesday Cubs:
Tuesday cubs are settling back in to scouting great. We had a wonderful time on group camp despite the rain, the highlight being the campfire. We had a hike in the Phoenix Park on Saturday 7th and managed to do 10.5km in the afternoon.
We are practicing hard for our investiture next Tuesday 17th. And finally, we are going on the county hike next Sat 21st!
Wednesday Cubs:
We visited Weston Aerodrome for the National Spectre event in July, followed by Group camp in September and then we had fun with First Aid over two weeks as part of our emergencies course and we covered basics such as getting help, staying safe, first aid basics, CPR, recovery positions and more.
Thursday Scouts:
This month we welcomed back our scouts and our new scouts who joined us from cubs. Over the past few weeks, we have been transitioning our new scouts by learning our scout promise and prayer. Our PLs (Patrol Leads) and APLs (Assistant Patrol Leads) took the lead on teaching the new scouts with a little help from the scout book.
To start the scout year off with a bang we joined the rest of Porterstown groups on our group camp. The scouts loved mixing with the other groups and stepping up to the challenge of putting up tents and helping the other groups when we went on our night hike. Once we were back in the den the leaders asked the scouts about the camp, what they would change or stay the same. The main idea taken was to get warmer and better showers which I think we can all agree on.
Lastly for this month we held our annual investiture where we officially welcome cubs into scouts. The new scouts earn their scout shirt and necker by learning their promise, prayer, engaging in badge work and trying their best in every aspect of scouts. We also invested our new Scout leader Lucy, who has come back to us after finishing in Ventures last year, having been a youth member since Beavers and has come all the way through the ranks. Welcome back Lucy!
Thursday Ventures:
Ventures participated in the campfire and danced the macarena for our Liliput group camp. While at Liliput. They also showed their leadership skills by assisting the beaver in pitching their tents and making sure their bags stayed dry; they were a major help to all! They roasted s’mores and built card houses over dinner, participated in nights hikes, obstacle course and completed the bog run, Róisín did not get stuck in the bog this time!!!
While at Liliput, Ventures met Cuala GAA who were traveling in on a group trip from Dalkey.
The ventures were sadly unable to go kayaking due to poor weather conditions but did get a Chinese Takeaway on the Saturday, which definitely made up for the lack of kayaking.
Post camp, the ventures helped taking down tents, pack away gear, clean up the campsite and dry out the tents once back to the den. We would have been lost without them!
To help the Ventures get to know each other, we organised a games night together. We participated in teams building games, learning economic skills (Monopoly) and a good old game of “spoons.”
Recently, the ventures have been planning a day trip to London for the Christmas markets and a trip to the Nightmare Realm and then a Halloween sleepover. They will also be going on the county Hike next weekend. As a fundraiser for our Kandersteg trip next Summer, ventures will be helping at the Porterstown Disco on Friday the 27th of October.
Friday Beavers:
Firstly, Friday night beavers want to give a warm welcome to our new beavers and our new beaver leader Lan.
Friday night beavers started off the new year with an amazing group camp. We had lots of fun activities, hikes and wall climbing, bog jumping etc.
As always, we enjoyed our favourite sausages from our scouting chiefs. Yummy 😋
We really loved our older cubs, scouts and ventures minding us and playing games with us.
We finished off our camp with an amazing campfire. For some of us, this was our first camp, and we were a little nervous of fire. So, we went and told stories on the hill, we watched the fire and listened to the fun songs our friends sang. We learned all about fire safety on the hill with our scouter and then we weren't scared anymore because we knew the scouters were keeping us safe. And we all had a singsong together. We learned and grew on this camp and most importantly, we made so many new friends.
We all worked really hard at home on our new skills, we practiced baking, horse riding, we learnt how to cycle bikes and sow our badges and lots of other brilliant skills. We are so super proud of our hard work and loved getting our certificates and badges.
We have also been working hard on our emergency badges; we have learned all about first aid kits and basic first aid. We really enjoyed making up our own emergency first aid scenario and acting it out. We think we have a few doctors in our group! We love how our older beavers are helping the newer beavers so much with this badge.
We have also learnt all about recycling paper into logs for the fire. We loved this as we got to learn and get messy all at the same time.
We are all looking forward to our next adventure together.
*Pictures that are shared with the newsletter are only shared internally with members of the group & parents, not on our website.*
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