Craft with beans, 25th July 2015

Written by: Jessica Koong, Sixer & Scribe Leader

This was the first meeting after handover and the new sixers and assistant sixers took charge. Surprisingly, many of the assistant sixers and cubs were not here. Nicale, the sixer of Possum, was pleasantly surprised because there were only 2 people in her six – the assistant sixer and herself!

After horseshoe, Mr Ho held up 3 enormous plastic bags and Ms Teo stood beside him carrying A3-size paper. Hmm… we wondered what fun activity he had in store for us. In the first bag were bear-shaped containers with the lid coloured either red or yellow. In the next bag, there were many bottles of white glue purchased from Art Friend. In the last bag, there were lots of hundreds and thousands (these are rainbow sprinkles), just larger versions! They were beans! Red beans, green beans and soya beans! Red, green and white.

Mr Ho explained the game: we had to sort out the beans according to their colour, then place them in a bear-shaped container. We could create any pattern we like such as the number 50 or even a rainbow. We could also create repeated layers of the 3 different types of beans. As the bag of beans was so big, we would probably have extra beans. With these extra beans, we could decorate the pelican printed on A3 paper with the white glue for bonus points.

Possum and Wallaby joined forces for the activity as our groups were small. We had about 2 hours to complete the tasks. Some scouts sorted out the beans and some filled the bear with the sorted beans while others decorated the pelican. I realised that the aim of this activity was to improve our patience and teamwork with one another.

In the end, my team completed the bear and pelican within the time limit. Fortunately, the beans did not get mixed up when we tried to shake the bear to check if we had put enough beans into in. Sadly, the cubs of one group did not cooperate and messed up the group’s sorted beans. They also did not have time to complete their pelican and it looked like a piece of abstract art!

All in all, the meeting was an enjoyable one and I am sure many of the cubs had fun filling their bears and decorating the pelicans.