Christmas

Christmas party the other night... went off ok, certainly not the most disaterous we've ever had! No, really, actually it was good. 

Started off with a boisterous game of balloon stamping... and didnt tell them we were going to turn the lights off until they started. Most amusing. 

Then a quiz, kindly made up by one of the other leaders, which was great, except I didnt know the answer to all the questions... ah, maybe I should have watched even more TV as a kid. 

The chocolate game was quite a success, especially as we didnt actually introduce it as such- the leaders got all the bits together, and started playing. One by one, the kids drifted over to join in, and within 3 mins, I stepped away and let the whole lot get on with it. A good piece of gaming with no shouted instruction or any type of information. One could almost call it viral...

The evening finished with charades, which I wasnt too convinced about, but they absolutely loved it. The most well thought out one being Brokeback mountain. (interesting point), everyone seemed obsessed with acting out the film/book content, rather than simply acting out the title... ie breaking syllables into sounds and acting them out... symptomatic of todays youth? I dont know. 

Last night

So... organisation is a good thing.
After last weeks sit-in-the-pub-and-work-out-what-the-heck-we-are-doing meeting, it was decided that it might be a good idea to incorporate more games into the evening.

as well as that, make the "tasks" more game like- so as to make it more like the Kids are enjoying themselves and arent noticing that they are learning.

So we started with flagbreak, all good, except for a fair amount of disruption by one member.
straight into the first game, dividing them down the centre of the hall- with no accounting for who wanted to be with whom.
tarpaulin, kids standing on the edge and finding the ball underneath.
second game was putting objects under buckets- using the same kind of teams, and each time getting a pair of them to find one of the objects.
Again- slight disruption from a particular member.

main activity was in teams- getting the teams to light a candle that was about 7ft away with non saftey matches- with sandpaper at 7ft away again.
no idea how it went as I was doing an investiture talk with 3 of them.

we split for tuck- at 2030- pretty good time keeping- and re-convened at 2045 when they did the circle/key game.
again, no idea how it went, as I was continuing with more investiture talking, while another leader was doing 1-2-1s with the elder explorers as to what they need to do to get their platinum/diamond awards.

ended with a game of 1 on 1 hockey and flag down.
15mins of disruption from one particular individual, and minimal phonage on behalf of the younguns.

Campfire Pizzas

We tried out this recipe on a recent camp and the explorers absolutely loved them. They where easy to make, the was pretty much no washing up and it make it easy to cater for vegetarians.

Ingredients:

• Tin foil
• Cooking oil
• boxes of pizza bread (1 box make enough dough for about 2 people)
• Tomato pizza topping or tomato based pasta sauce
• Grated Cheese
• A selection of toppings

For the topping we had:

• mushrooms
• tomatoes
• pinapple
• ham
• pepperoni

Method:

1. Give each person a sheet of tin foil about 50cm is plenty.
2. pour1-2tsp(s) of cooking oil on the the tin foil and get them to spread it all over the tin foil with there fingers (this also help with stopping dough sticking to their fingers too much).
3. Put a portion of the dough on to the centre of the foil and get the person to start flattening out the dough. it does not have to be a perfect circle. We need find that a thinner base when crispy when it was cooked and thinker base turned out more like bread when cooked
   
4. once the the pizza base is ready spoon on the tomato sauce and spread over the base avoid going right up to the edge of the base.
5. Sprinkle liberally with the grated cheese
6. add the topping of your choice.
7. Now fold the pizza and the tin foil in half like a Cornish Pasty or a Calzone
8. once the pizza is in half carefully peel back the tin foil and press the edges of the pizza together.
9. finally wrap the pizza back up in the tin foil and place on the fire. We had ours about about 6 inch away for the base of the fire and kept feeding the fire.
10. While the pizza are cooking keep turning them over so that the dough get cooked evenly on both sides.
11. once cooked open up the tin foil and enjoy.

Note: The camp we made the pizzas on was so wet we did not take the camera out the tent so recreated the pizzas at home to get the phones.