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Developing an Annual Troop Calendar Matthew Lewis The first step to planning a successful annual calendar is to identify the activities that you need to schedule around. You will not be able to avoid all conflicts, and indeed, unforeseen activities will crop up a few times a year. But, you will face far fewer scheduling dilemmas and have far greater support for your camps and activities from your scouts, their families, and your adult leadership if you can schedule around as many possible conflicts as possible. To perform this step, start with a blank calendar for the coming year and add all the information contained in the list below. It may not be easy to gather the information on the list. You will be assimilating information from personal calendars, school calendars, the stake calendar, the ward calendar, the scouting council and district calendars, and a handful of other sources. Do your best during this stage to identify any possible potential conflict. The better job you do here, the easier the planning of your calendar becomes, and the fewer frustrations you will face next year. Your camps and activities will avoid serious conflicts. Your will be better able to avoid "killer weeks" where you, as a leader, seem to be totally occupied in running from one Scout obligation to another. Things to put on the calendar - Troop member events - Holidays that may affect families - Other School Holidays - Church events - Ward events - Meetings - School - Major school events that may affect your scouts or their families - Community events that may affect families - Scouting - Full Moons (you may want to plan a camp for a full moon for a night hike, or for a new moon for astronomy, etc.) - Any other set dates that may affect your scouts or your leaders
Matthew's General Principles of LDS Scout Troop Calendaring 1- Do not plan camps for closer than three weeks apart. This will allow leaders and scouts to have at least two "Scout camp-free" weekends between camps for other obligations. 2- Try to limit the calendar to a maximum of two or three things per week. Avoid planning killer weeks for troop members and especially leaders (e.g., a week with a youth fireside, the regular troop meeting, a fund-raiser event, Roundtable, and a camp will test the commitment of almost any leader. Usually, with planning, these types of weeks can be avoided.) 3- Take weather and climate into strong consideration when planning outings. For example: Don't plan on climbing a high-elevation peak in the spring. Don't plan on a desert camping trip in the middle of the summer. 4- Try to avoid scheduling troop activities that will interfere with other activities that affect many of your scouts or leaders, e.g., if most of your scouts play baseball, do not schedule summer camp for the week of baseball playoffs. 5- Do not blindly schedule activities over school holiday periods like Spring Break (or UEA, in Utah) without the explicit approval of your scouts' parents. Many families use those times for vacations or other family trips. 6- Try to schedule outings around other major ward and stake events. For example, try not to schedule summer camp the same week as Youth Conference or girl's camp. 7- Make sure at least two of your camps per year provide activities that fulfill requirement 9b of the Camping merit badge (hike up a 2,000 foot mountain, backpack four miles, bicycle 15 miles, four hour float trip, rappel 30 feet). If you do two of these per year, each boy should have four of these opportunities during his two years as a Boy Scout. 8- Make sure that at least one of your camps per year provides a service project that fulfills requirement 9c of the Camping merit badge ("On one of your camp-outs, perform a conservation project approved in advance by the private landowner or public land management agency".) 9- Plan to have a camp-out or a major outdoor activity every month, if possible.
Camp/Major Monthly Activities Planning The purpose of this section of planning is to schedule one camp or major outdoor activity for each month of the year, making sure that they conflict with as few things as possible, and that, if possible, they are each at least three weeks apart. It may help to start with a piece of paper, chalkboard or white board, with the names of the months listed in one column with a space to write the camp or activity for that month once it is determined. 1. Look through the calendar you have prepared and determine if there are any months where it will be impossible to hold a camp or a major activity. (In some recent years, our troop found November to be such a month. A Merit Badge Pow Wow occupied the boys for the first three Saturdays in November, followed by Thanksgiving weekend excluding the last Saturday in November. In this instance, we rationalized the Pow Wow to be our major activity that month, even though it was not outdoors and not a true troop activity.) If you have any of those months, make a note of that on your months planning sheet. (e.g. "November ... Merit Badge Pow Wow".) 2. Now it is time to determine how many camps you plan on having during the year. This decision usually falls squarely on the Scoutmaster. I would recommend a minimum of seven or eight. Some troops camp monthly and earn a Year-round Camping award. For months that you do not camp overnight, you should still hold a major outdoor activity (hike, bike trip, fishing, rock climbing, etc.), probably on a Saturday. 3. Review your least flexible camping opportunities and decide which of those the troop will attend. Are there church-sponsored Young Men camps that your troop will be expected to attend? Do you want to attend any of the district camps that are planned? Are there other camps that you want to hold that have a specific fixed date? Mark those camps on your calendar and write a short description of each of those camps after the corresponding month on your months planning sheet. (e.g. January ... District Klondike Derby) 4. The troop adult and scout leadership should have decided by now what your week-long summer camp next year is going to be. You may plan to attend a Council Scout Camp. You may plan to go on a backpacking trip, a float trip or a cycling trip. Place this camp on the calendar now and write it on your month's planning sheet (e.g., "June ... Summer Camp"). Make sure that it does not fall within three weeks before any camp already on the calendar. (Principle #1) If it does you should try to shuffle the dates of summer camp or the other camp until those dates work. If you cannot move either date then just move on to the next step, resigned to the fact that those couple of weeks are going to be hectic. 5. Many troops have yearly camping traditions. If you some of those traditions, you should take them into consideration here. Our troop developed a tradition of a three-day backpacking trip in the High Uinta Mountains each summer in addition to summer camp. We also developed the tradition of a Southern Utah desert camp (alternating between Goblin Valley State Park and Arches National Park every year) in the early Spring. Taking these camps one at a time, select a month for the camp from the available months left. Open your calendar to that month and see how many available weekends there are in that month for a camp. You may be fortunate and have two or three weekends to choose from. Some months you may have only one weekend that would avoid serious conflict. Choose the weekend that seems best, avoiding, again, placing the camp within three weeks of a camp already scheduled. Remember to avoid, if possible, creating a "killer week" for yourself or the boys. If you have a choice between weekends, place the camp on the weekend that will make for a less hectic week. Write the camp on your months planning sheet ("March ... Arches National Park camp"). Repeat those steps for any other traditional camps you have. 6. If the camps already on the calendar do not include at least two camps with activities from Camping merit badge requirement 9b (hike up a 2,000 foot mountain, backpack four miles, bicycle 15 miles, four hour float trip, rappel 30 feet) then take a moment now and decide which of those activities you will do on camps next year. If you already have a camp that will include one of those activities, you only need to select one. Usually your choice of activity will dictate the window of months that you could camp and successfully include that activity as part of your camp. If you chose two activities, look first at the activity that has a more restrictive time window (e.g. there may be just a couple months when it would be possible to do a float trip, but five or six months when it would be possible to do a cycling trip. If you chose those two activities, start with the float trip.) With your activity in mind, select a month from the available months you have left to schedule. Use the instructions in step #5 to select a weekend for the camp. Write the camp on your months planning sheet (e.g. "July ... float trip camp") This is not the time to specify the plans for the camp. Don't try to decide now where you will go. That is a decision later for you to help your youth leaders make. For now, just leave it as a camp with an activity associated. If you have a second activity to plan a camp for, repeat the above instructions for that camp. 7. At this point, you should have at least two camps tentatively scheduled, but more likely four or five. In planning the year of 2003 with these steps, we had six of camps already selected at this point. Figure out how many more camps you need to schedule and place them on the calendar one at a time following the steps in step #5. Do not concern yourself about where the camp will be held or what you will try to accomplish on the camp. Simply, place them on the calendar and include them on the months planning sheet (e.g. "October ... Camp"). 8. You should now have all your camps tentatively scheduled. If you have planned to camp monthly, skip to step 11. 9. There are months left on your months planning sheet without a camp that need a major outdoor activity. Although not necessarily an outdoor activity I would recommend that you consider holding a Junior Leader Training seminar for the scouts in your troop each year as one of your activities. This seminar is normally directed by the Scoutmaster following the materials provided by the Boy Scouts of America. The seminar includes numerous team-building games and exercises, a video that is shown to teach and emphasize the principles of the course and opportunities for the scouts to reflect on those things as a group. The JLT seminar was intended to be used to train the youth leaders of the troop, but we found great benefit in exposing every boy to its concepts. The seminar alone takes about three hours. One exercise in the seminar includes eating lunch or dinner so it doesn't seem that long. The boys always enjoyed the seminar. We always chose to hold this seminar as one of our monthly activities during the winter. For each month left on your calendar without a camp or activity you need to select a day for your major activity. Most likely these will be Saturdays since a major activity usually requires a larger amount of time than is available on a weeknight. If you have strong feelings about what one of these activities ought to be, or if you have a troop tradition for a major non-camping activity, include that idea on the months planning sheet ("September ... Climb a Mountain Activity"), otherwise you should just identify it as an activity ("September ... Activity"). Remember as you schedule these activities that you should still space them at least three weekends from any other camp or activity, if possible. You may need to shuffle the activity or shuffle another activity or camp to make that work. 10. Your months planning sheet should be full. You should have your camp and/or major activity set for each month. Review the dates again to make sure that they are spaced appropriately and have avoided, as best as can be expected, serious conflicts with outside events and activities.
Courts of Honor The next task is to plan when you will hold Courts of Honor. We decided to hold Courts of Honor quarterly. Our stake sponsored a Court of Honor every six months, so we decided to augment those with two more Troop Courts of Honor a year. The Stake Courts of Honor were held in April and October. We decided to hold our Troop Courts of Honor in January and July to space the courts out fairly evenly through the year. We decided to hold our Troop Courts of Honor on the same night as our troop meetings, although you are free to schedule them for any other night. Some troops hold them on Sunday evenings, others on a different weeknight. We scheduled them on our normal troop meeting night simply to reduce the number of evenings that our leaders would need to be away from their families. 1. Determine which dates you will hold Courts of Honor and write them onto the calendar.
Program Features/Themes With your camps, major activities and Courts of Honor in place, it is now time to fold your program themes into the schedule. These program themes provide structure and continuity to your yearly program, by governing the purpose and content of your weekly meetings, your camps and your major activities. The Boy Scouts of America suggests that a troop choose a program theme for each month and provide three "Program Features" manuals, each containing twelve program features. (These manuals replaced the old "Woods Wisdom" manual but contain largely the same content.) Each program feature section contains resource material, weekly meeting plans and camp or outdoor activity plans for a entire month. The thirty-six program features are: Aquatics, Athletics, Backpacking, Boating/Canoeing, Business, Camping, Citizenship, Communications, Cooking, Cultural Awareness, Emergency Preparedness, Engineering, Environment, First Aid, Fishing, Forestry, Health Care, High Adventure, Hiking, Hobbies, Leadership, Mechanics, Nature, Orienteering, Physical Fitness, Pioneering, Public Service, Safety, Science, Shooting, Special Cooking, Sports, Tracking, Wilderness Survival, Wildlife Management, and Winter Camping. Although the Boy Scouts of America suggest twelve monthly themes, I would suggest that eight to ten is a more reasonable number for LDS Scout troops. This is largely due to the unique requirement that LDS troops have to attend a combined Young Men/Young Women activity per month instead of holding a normal troop meeting. Once combined activity nights are subtracted for the year, an LDS troop starts with only 40 troop meetings per year, rather than the 52 a non-LDS troop would have. On top of combined activities, invariably at least a handful more troop meetings per year will not be held due to scheduling conflicts (holidays, special events, Courts of Honor, Parent's nights, Summer Camp, etc.) On average, we found that 34 to 36 troop meetings a year was what we had to work with. Planning for an average of four troop meetings per program theme gave us eight to ten program themes per year as a more reasonable goal. 1. Using your calendar, count the number of troop meetings that you will have to devote to your program features. The main task here is to look through your calendar a week at a time, seeing if your normal troop meeting will not be held. Combined Young Men/Young Women activities will likely take away twelve troop meetings. Holidays or school vacations may take away some meetings. You may have Courts of Honor that will take away some troop meetings. You will likely not have a normal troop meeting during the week of Summer Camp. 2. Once you have determined how many troop meetings you will have, you need to determine how many program themes you will use for those meetings. The first step is identify how many, if any, "mandatory" themes you plan to use this year. Mandatory themes are themes that you, as the Scoutmaster, feel need to be covered this year. For example, I developed the philosophy that our themes ought to introduce each boy to most Eagle required merit badges during his two years in our program. Hence, every year I mandated four or five themes to introduce these merit badges. For example, year one may have included Citizenship, Cycling, First Aid, Emergency Preparedness, and Physical Fitness. Year two may have included Business, Family, Communications, Environment. Then, year three would repeat the themes of year one, and so forth. These nine themes would introduce each scout to 11 Eagle required merit badges during his two years with us. (The twelfth Eagle required merit badge, Camping, we would "introduce" repeatedly through our regular camps.) Notice that we chose Cycling over Hiking and Swimming, and chose Emergency Preparedness over Lifesaving Your personal preferences may be different. The other reason I found for including "mandatory" themes in the program was to prepare boys for traditional outings where special skills would be required. In our calendar, Backpacking and Winter Camping were "mandatory" themes. We held an annual backpacking trip and attended our District's Klondike Derby (winter camp) each year. We wanted to prepare the boys adequately for the special challenges those two camps offered. So, in our troop, we had six to seven themes a year that were "mandatory" themes. 3. For each "mandatory" theme, determine how many troop meetings it would take to due justice to the theme. Remember that the BSA literature expects a theme per month, so extending a theme past four weeks ought to the exception rather than the rule. I think the only two themes we ever extended past four weeks were Cycling (to allow us to do more of the cycling trips required by Cycling merit badge) and Citizenship (to adequately introduce the three Citizenship merit badges.) Some themes can be adequately covered in three weeks or even less, but those should be exceptions, also. Since we had the two "mandatory" themes of Backpacking and Winter Camping each year, we scheduled them as two week themes only. The majority of our themes were scheduled for four weeks. 4. The next step is choosing your "optional" themes. Once you have subtracted the number of mandatory theme troop meetings from the number of total troop meetings you will know how many more troop meetings you have available for "optional" themes. "Optional" themes are suggested by the boys themselves. We would give each boy a list of the program features (but not including our thirteen "mandatory" themes, not including some that would naturally progress out of our camping program, and not including the themes we did last year–for variety's sake) and have them place a mark by each of the themes that interested them. We would then tally up the votes and order the themes by the amount of votes received. We usually had enough troop meetings to include two to four "optional" themes. We didn't feel compelled to select the top-two or top-three or top-four themes on the list but would select the "optional" themes from as high on their list as possible. In selecting, we took into account the "mandatory" themes already scheduled and the feasability to justly treat the themes based on finances, time, location and adult expertise. 5. You should now have the list of program themes that you plan to cover this year and for each, the amount of troop meetings that will be required. Now it is time to fit these themes onto the calendar. This process always requires some shuffling and juggling, so it would be wise to use a pencil and don't get frustrated. The first themes that should be placed on the calendar are those that are tied to a specific camp or activity. For instance, our Winter Camping theme always got placed on the two closest available troop meetings to our Klondike Derby winter camp, and our Backpacking theme always got placed on the two closest available troop meetings to our August backpacking trip. Pencil those theme names on the calendar on the days of your troop meetings. Now, it's time to pencil in the other themes. Starting with the theme that is most weather-restrictive place its name next to the troop meetings at the most logical time of year. Don't worry too much about starting the theme on the first week of the month unless it makes sense. Don't worry either about having a combined activity or Court of Honor that splits your theme in half. The situation of doing two weeks of a theme before a combined activity and two weeks of the theme after the combined activity is inevitable. Repeat the process for the next most weather-restrictive theme and so on until all troop meetings are scheduled with a theme. It's likely you may need to move another theme forward or backwards a week or two to make another theme work. Just keep shifting and juggling the themes until they all fit in. 6. You should now have all camps and outdoor activities scheduled and have all troop meetings assigned a theme. One more step and you will have a completed annual calendar planned. The last step is to revisit the camps and outdoor activities that do not have a specific purpose and assign a theme to them. Look through your monthly camps and outdoor activities for those that you did not assign a purpose (e.g. October 7-8...camp or September 6...activity.) Assign the camp or activity a theme based on one of the themes near it on your calendar. If you choose the theme prior to the camp or activity, the event can serve as a culmination of the theme as suggested by the BSA literature. So your "October camp" may become your "October-Citizenship camp" or your "October-Fishing camp". Do not worry about the specifics of the camp or activity, just assign it a theme. Your annual planning is complete. You have a full calendar ready to implement. The next process is how to get from the annual calendar to the week-to-week planning necessary to implement the annual plan. Click here to see an annual troop calendar that was developed using these processes. |
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