Archive for the ‘Explorer Unit’ Category

Tonight – following the rules that the best pioneering projects are both dangerous and fun tonight we built a giant crossbow. Check out the footage at qik.com/lloydml The other half of the unit learned basic climbing skills as part of the climbers badge. Next week we swap and try to beat the distance fired record.

Tonight we had great fun making our own orienteering course for the other groups to do next week.

We had two two groups making a course with cameras one with compas co~ordinates, and one with traditional orienteering course. As an act of great kindness our group gave a poor bird with no family a funeral sparing no expence with our flowers.

Tonight we made bird boxes as part of our nature programme theme. We used a range of power tools and good old fashioned hammer and nails to create nesting spots for our feathery friends. The completed boxes have gone home and the Explorers have a challenge to provide photographic evidence that their boxes are in place and inhabited. We went for a 25mm opening favoured by blue tits.

In preparation for the Geoffrey Gordon Cup next weekend we had a day out in the hills to do a bit of navigation practice. We had a good go at doing back bearings, walking in a compass party and timing and pace counting. The navigation was challenging at times as lots of the trees that were shown on the map were no longer there. We all had a great day and despite the rain could still get a good view of the snow capped Cheviots

This week – following our health theme – we spent the night playing games. In the unit the duty sub-unit always chooses the game for the night. This is usually murderball or dodgeball, which are both uni favourites. This week we played a number of new games and rated them.  Most popular games were horse and rider (a game where you pair up horse and rider style and battle to steal the neckerchief from your opponents head) and that’t my chair (everyone but two members of the unit sit on chairs randomly placed around the room. One of the chairless dudes tries to tig the other. When he is tug their roles reverse. This keeps going on until the one who is being chsed touches the back of one of the chairs and says “That’s my chair!” Then the person sitting on the chair replaces them in the game.)

We then went on to play a few dafter games like nice sweet little kitty (sounds safer than murderball at least) and bunnies. The night was a huge success and from now on we have a few more games to choose from. A Unit challenge has been issued to find even more new games to try.  But not Paul Ball – which is a game where we once used Paul as a ball. He said that game will NEVER be played again.

As part of our health programme theme
, this week we found out how much sugar, salt and fat content was in some of the foods we eat daily. We did it by measuring out the  amount of fat out in lard as well as the sugar and salt. We cooked the food too just to check what it tasted like

We found that ASDA chicken and mushroom pie was the most unhealthy of the food we tested. Bring on the lard. Mmmm!

It looks like real food

Hi all. As its been really hard for us to book the leisure centre for this wednesday we are going back to the drawing board with the programme. We’ll let you know as soon as we can what we are doing instead.