May at James’ Place Basingstoke

Time flies when you are having fun! This month at James’ Place Basingstoke we have been exploring the world around us and providing our members with new experience and opportunities. We believe in the importance of kindness and helping others, therefore our main goal this month was to spread positivity and support others within our community.

Earth Week

“We are on Earth to take care of life; we are on Earth to take care of each other”

This week we focused on how we impact the world around us, and the importance of how small actions have significant positive effects on our environment. During the beginning of the week, we worked as a team to come up with a variety of ideas of how we can help the environment. The members made the suggestions of recycling at the barn, turning off the lights when not in a room, turning off the taps properly after use, collecting rainwater to water our plants, and litter picking in our community. We were very impressed with the recycling poster made by one of our members, informing you about how to correctly recycle. At JP we have also been engaging with sensory activities, the members worked hard as a team during our “ocean clean up” session to remove all the toxic materials from the water. Excellent Teamwork! Throughout earth week we also went around our local parks and nature reserves to do some litter picking. We were also invited by our friends at Dashwood Manor House and St Marks Primary School to go litter picking with them at Beggarwood Park, it’s a great feeling knowing that we are making a huge difference to the local community.

Book Week

During book week we explored notorious books and authors and created activities around the themes of them. The books/authors we choose were Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Mr Men by Roger Hargreaves, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll, Roal Dahl, and The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. This week’s theme created a lot of opportunities for our members to get creative and messy, for example the members created an exotic jungle scene where Mowgli meets the snake Kaa. They did this by using a shoe box and using different materials such as card, cloth, and tissue paper to make the rainforest replica. The members also got hands on and explored their tactile senses with ‘Mr Twits Rainbow Worm Spaghetti’, an activity for our brave hearted members.

British Values

With British Values Week, we thought about skills and fundamentals, which we believe are important attributes to Britain. One value is respect of our land and the animals which inhabit it, therefore, to celebrate this we decided to visit ‘Cholerton Rare Breed Farm’ and see all the hard work our British Farmers put in to help our country. The members loved seeing the variety of farm animals including sheep, pigs, chickens, and cows, all of which provide for us. Back at the barn we created our very own farming display showing where our crops, resources, food, and materials are resourced from. It’s fascinating how much we rely on farming as a country.

Later in the week, we explored the ‘History of The British Scouts Association’ and camping in England. Robert Baden-Powell founded Scouts in 1910 and of today the organisation is still preparing young people with skills for life. To educate our members about Scouts and camping we took them to “The Lookout” in Bracknell where the members had to use the resources around them to build a waterproof den to have their picnic in. Back at the barn we made our own Scout badges and learnt how to put up a tent effectively. We then cooked sausages and enjoyed our hotdogs in our base camp. At the end of the day, we all learnt the Scout’s Promise.

I promise that I will do my best to uphold our Scout values, to do my duty to The King, to be kind and helpful and to love our world and to keep the Cub Scout Law.