How have you implemented Boy scouts/cubs into homeschool?

[Lux Et Veritas Academy]

Any creative ideas on how to work your merit badges or requirements into your program?

[Kathie in VA]

I've thought about this a bit. I do sometimes wish I could work our homeschool work into scouts! :D

 

Last year was our first year in Boy Scouts. All my ds's scout work was done outside of school time... well most of it. Instead of doing history at one point, I worked with him on a lapbook for the law merit badge... which he didn't get yet :glare:. He had visited the local courts with the troop so we did some more research and put the info into a lap book (our first). It took way longer than I planned but it worked out okay. He then used it for his presentation at our Co-op.... so it did get double duty.

 

Next year I'm going to leave some time in the schedule for him to work on his merit badges... it will be like an elective class. He has already made it to First Class so at this point he really needs to work on the merit badges... and these look like they will need some research and writing time.

 

My dh keeps wanting me to consider the merit badge work as his school work for science or history etc. But the way I see it, he is already an 8th grader and needs to do his full school subjects in prep for high school... not just some scattered work in science from a variety of merit badges. Yet it can still count as an elective, I think.

[sarah in tenn]

My son will be a first class this next month, and I have not been able to correlate the badges and trips to science or unit studies. A friend of mine has with some success, and she also works it so her kids enter their projects into the county fair to earn some money.

Triple duty!

sarah

[Nancy in MI]

I schedule an hour or so of quiet reading time every afternoon and I let him read the merit badge booklets and fill out the worksheets then. He does his reading for "school" (literature and such) at night in bed.

 

Sometimes, we can make a field trip out of it. For instance, when he was working on his merit badge for Citizenship of the Nation, we went to Washington DC. When it came time to meet with his merit badge counselor, who works at the county courthouse, he spent the day with his counselor job-shadowing.

 

:001_smile:

Nancy

[Peela]

Our lives seem to revolve around Scouts..our troop is excellent, the leaders are obsessive and sooo committed it's scary and makes us parents feel so half hearted. However, the troop is more focused on fun and experiences than badges so I consider my two kids, one of whom is a patrol leader and the other an assistant patrol leader, to be gaining a lot of leadership skills and many other skills (survival, boating, camping etc) within the whole setup. We just don't work on badges in our own time, at all. Scouts already takes up at least every 2nd weekend, one evening a week, another evening a month for patrol meetings, Saturday afternoons all summer for sailing, time in the holidays for trainings for competitions- not to mention the week my daughter spent in the desert with the aborigines earlier this year- I jsut ain't giving any more time to it!

(of course, my kids love it- it's such a great thing for homeschoolers).

[Mallory]

We have only scouts and 4-H scheduled for Friday afternoons. I know that doesn't really integrate them with our school, but having some time set aside works good here.

[Ellie]

Scout School.

 

I counted our Camp Fire and 4-H activities as part of our curriculum. I didn't do anything extra, you understand, because the badge requirements themselves and activities were enough.