My son has his first boy scout meeting day after tomorrow–here's hoping that his new SM has put as much thought into this as y'all have.  Honestly I'm a little nervous–it looks like the 5th graders coming in are basically doubling the size of this troop. But, he'll be with his buddies, at least 3-4 other boys he already knows, and hopefully they'll have a handle on it.

Guess it's time to show him how to swap out the numbers and patches on his uniform!

bryanspellman said:

AmyS said:

My son has his first boy scout meeting day after tomorrow–here's hoping that his new SM has put as much thought into this as y'all have.  Honestly I'm a little nervous–it looks like the 5th graders coming in are basically doubling the size of this troop. But, he'll be with his buddies, at least 3-4 other boys he already knows, and hopefully they'll have a handle on it.

Guess it's time to show him how to swap out the numbers and patches on his uniform!

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Well?  How did it go?
 

YIS

Bryan

For him, it went fine. There are going to be about 10 boys in his new patrol, they are calling themselves the Green Hornets. They have a couple boys serving as troop guides to help get them started. They elected a patrol leader and they're getting ready for summer camp. He's pretty stoked. He rode his bike back and forth to the meeting on his own this week (about a half mile from our house).

He also removed all his cub scout patches from his own uniform and sewed on his new troop number. For those teaching their boys to do their own sewing, I highly recommend an embroidery hoop. It makes it much easier for them. We put the hoop on and I helped him safety pin the patches on (they are pretty thick to get through and kind of hard to line up the 3 numbers in a row), and he stitched them down.

For me..well..they don't have a current troop roster. I sort of know 1 person on the committee, her sons were in our pack. The scoutmaster rattled off the names of the rest of the committee. They just changed the day/time of the committee meetings and haven't firmed them up yet. The troop didn't get their first choice week for camp because it was already taken by the time they got their paperwork in, so they're having to change around their calendar (which, granted, they do in December for the whole next year). He said they send minutes out to all the parents so I'll get a list of emails sometime next month based on that, but it won't correlate names to emails. They might be doing a fundraiser sometime before camp, but it's not set up yet.  So…being used to the level and style of organization of our cub scout pack (ie, my way–being the secretary and calendar keeper I basically also kept everything running), it's taking some getting used to. I'm sure some of that is the cub/boy transition but it seems that some of it is also a matter of style.