Sunday, March 25, 2012

E is for Eagle Required Merit Badges

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I know, I know... I blogged about scouts just a couple weeks ago (B is for Boy Scouts) and I will undoubtedly blog about scouts again (S is for Scout Camp?  M is for Merit Badge?  S is for Star Scout?  L is for Life Scout?  V is for Volunteer Projects?)

This topic seemed to fit this week.

Connor & William spent a couple days doing a mini-retreat to work on merit badges.  Primarily, Eagle-required ones.  To make Eagle, among a bunch of other stuff, a boy needs to earn roughly 21 merit badges.  About half of those are merit badges of his choosing.  About half are required ones.  Most of the required ones are fabulous -- First Aid, Communication, that kind of thing.


My two oldest are both in need of some Eagle-required stuff.  So this weekend, they focused on these two:



Personal Management -- this merit badge requires all kinds of amazingly wonderful stuff like keeping track of your income and expenses, keeping track of time, learning about compound interest and stocks, and so on and on and on.


After the discussions this past weekend, Connor has almost earned this.  He should get it finished off at the scout meeting tomorrow night.


And that means that I do actually have some hope that he is moving forward towards Eagle.  This is an Eagle-required merit badge that I would prefer my kids work on later rather than sooner.  I think Connor is learning so much more from this now than he would have three years ago.


Personal Fitness -- this merit badge primarily involves creating a 12 week fitness program and doing it.  All three of my boy scouts are working on this one.  This is not only the very first Eagle-Required badge for Thomas, it is also the very first merit badge he is working on (Archaeology will be starting up soon too!)


The plan was approved, and tomorrow marks the start of the 12 weeks.  The boys are using the Couch Potato to 5K plan for part of their fitness plan... and they are planning to run a 5K too.  I can't wait.


Connor has a couple others that he needs to be working on too, but these two have been his focus right now.


William is at a point where he needs to be earning Eagle-required merit badges in order to advance too.  In addition to the Personal Fitness one, he is looking at working on Citizenship in the Nation, and I'm trying to encourage him and Thomas to work on Family Life.  We have no shortage of family projects around right now. 



I mean, really, how amazing is a merit badge that forces the kids to do a couple somethings to significantly benefit the family?  I can come up with about a bazillion ideas --
  • Run a freezer cooking session and get a bunch of meals into the freezer
  • Reorganize the kitchen cupboards
  • Go through all the VHS tapes so we can donate most of them and get 'em out of the house
  • Put up the shed Dale bought a few weeks ago
  • Get a box of Ziploc bags and put together bread machine mixes 
  • Get the cinder block garden set up to go for this summer, then get it planted
  • Reshelve all the books (okay, that may be too big of a project for a mere Boy Scout!)
  • Build the climbing gym thing that is sitting in pieces outside
  • Build a chicken coop
  • Inventory and defrost the chest freezer
  • Clear the tumbleweeds from around the house
  • Process some of the bulk food we have around here and get it stored (dried beans cooked and into the freezer, for instance)
Can I borrow someone else's Boy Scout?  I've got enough ideas here for at least six kids, and I only have two boys in need of this merit badge.

You know, I need to look into the Home Repairs merit badge, which isn't Eagle-Required, but maybe it should be... I could at least look at requiring it for MY scouts, right?





Go check out others in this E Week for Blogging Through the Alphabet, where people are blogging about topics such as Education, Embrace, and Energy.

1 comment:

Michelle Smith said...

I'd say you could certainly require a merit badge for your scout, Debra! Home repair is a good one. Our son has fixed dripping faucets, replaced a broken handle for the tub/shower, etc. And then there are all the auto repair projects around here . . .

;) And, gardening made our list for Family Life as well. Then we picked up a separate gardening merit badge book, because we figured we were so far into gardening at that point, it would be easy to just add on to what we already had planned and complete it.

I should have joined this meme myself, but I didn't notice it until C, I think! ;)