Rangers points for skills night

We had a gap in our plan, I'm not sure how it happened but I was left with a night to fill and I was stumped and time short so I went through the boxes under my bed to see what we had and decided on a 'points for skills' night.

I packaged up a number of tasks and gave each of them a points value of some where between 5 and 25 points














I split the girls into teams of 2s and 3s.  This is something I rarely do, but it is an important part of our leadership brief to vary the sizes of groups the girls work in,  so it was a good to do it for a change.

I read through the tasks and points with the girls. I  left the tasks out for them to pick and choose as they felt best to maximise their team's skills to get the most points overall, whether that be lots of quick low pointers of a few high pointers.

I put up some flip chart paper with the team names on to write the scores onto as they gained them so they could see the competition hotting up.



The challenges were varied:




square lash 4 poles - 20 points

make an egg supporting structure with only newspaper - 15 points  (there were chocolate eggs to be eaten inside the plastic eggs, there was no way I could risk the church carpet with real eggs!)

Make a frog fly catcher - 25 points

Sort out all the green hama beads - 20 points

post-it note face - 1 point a post-it - minimum 5

Sew on a button - 10 points


I also had:

Make bunch (minimum 3) fork flowers - 10 points

I cut up the guiding promise and laws in lines and had  'put them in order' - 10 points (not one group chose that.  I had put the answer in there for them to copy but because they didn't even open it they never found that out!)

2 cups and 2 ping-pong balls (simultaneously throw and catch across the room) - 5 points (they loved that one!)

wrap a present - 5 points

Join 2 pieces of rope together - 5 to 15 points depending on the knot used (knot instructions were available to them on the table - they didn't all notice that)

Make a hat out of newspaper - 5 to 15 points based on creativity

Complete a wordsearch - 10 points (I had created a guiding based one with an online tool)

Write a limerick - 15 points  (they really enjoyed that too)

Other things I also thought might be ideas were:

changing a quilt cover
putting a sleeping bag into its sack
make a bedding roll
put up a one man tent
peeling a carrot
putting a screw into a piece of wood


I think you could do this with just about anything that you can lay your hands on at the time to be honest.

They all stuck at this for 90 minutes without wanting to stop or any of them giving up.  At the end of the evening they added up their points and the winning team declared.  One of the losing teams seemed a little miffed and had a bit of a blame game going on so I wandered into the cross fire, gently put down a bag of chocolate eggs and wandered out again...that seemed enough to end the hostilities, maybe chocolate is the way to world peace!