Successful Wolf Scout Meetings

Congrats on moving up to Wolf! Now that you have hopefully gotten a year of Tigers under your belt, planning meetings should be a bit easier. Just as with Tiger Scouts, take Wolf Scouts one step at a time. You don’t need to have your entire year planned out before beginning. You also definitely don’t need to know everything this is to know about Nova either. But if you want to learn a little more about Nova Awards, try my post on Nova Awards during Wolf Scouts. Not only will this help you with planning which electives to try out but it’ll also give you an in-depth guide to how we tackled Nova Award meetings.

Preparing for the Meeting

With each meeting, you will still need to record the adventures that you complete for each scout. Hopefully you still have that special signature and date stamp from Tigers. One leader, or parent, quickly stamps each scout’s book that attended the meeting. Such a great tracker for families, as we asked our scouts to keep their own books.

Attendance

But as leaders, we needed another method for tracking attendance. Pull out your sign-in sheet from Tigers and make any updates to the scouts in your den. Even as Wolf Scouts, the sign in sheet is super helpful. The sign-in sheets were a wonderful record when we needed to double check a scout’s requirements met. Be sure to date each sign-in sheet.

Agendas

While you write out your agenda, continue to keep track of the adventure requirement met with each activity that you complete. We would type it right on the agenda, right after the activity. We also typed the pages that needed stamped in the book on the top of the agenda. This made it easy to enter the advancements worked on at each meeting.

One leader would collect the agenda (we made copies for all the leaders) and the sign-in sheet. Then they could easily add in the advancements for each scout who attended the meeting. Plus, leaders always knew which advancement they were working on for each part of the meeting. Another great tip is providing a copy of the agenda to parents, or at least the list of adventures completed. You can ask each parent partner to enter in the information into their scout’s Scoutbook.

Completing Advancements

We found that the Wolf Scout adventures had much less overlap than the Tiger Scout year. So for this year, we mostly chose a different adventure per meeting to focus on. We tied the elective adventures to Nova Awards. Then, we would usually be able to add Nova requirement part 3 into the elective adventure meeting. This then left us with a field trip for each Nova Award and a discussion with their Nova counselor to discuss the specific STEM questions and observations.

At our first Wolf Scout meeting, we made sure to cover Call of the Wild 2 and Running with the Pack 6. These specific requirements helped us to prepare for our annual fall campout with our scouts. Plus, they were things we would do anyways to get ready for any trip with our scouts.

Fall Campout

Our fall campout is where we completed most of the requirements for earning rank. If you want to complete most of your rank requirements in a day, check out the Beginning of the year Campout post. It provides you with a nice sequence of activities to quickly and efficiently earn rank with just a few requirements to finish up when you return from the campout.

Pair Electives and Nova Awards

We finished up Finding Your Way at our meeting right after the campout, then we moved onto elective adventures paired with Nova Awards. We paired this with Technology Nova: Tech Talk.

Our den paired Paws of Skill with Engineering Nova: Swing!

We found the Council Fire and Hometown Hero had a bit of overlap and could be planned together, especially if you happen to have a connection to a military, firefighter, or police officer in the den.

We also paired Air of the Wolf with Math Nova: Fearful Symmetry.

Last, we paired Digging in the Past with Science Nova: Down and Dirty. For this adventure we asked the families to assist us with bringing in the materials for the snack. We asked for flavored jello cups, pudding cups, animal crackers, graham crackers, plastic spoons, clear plastic cups, and napkins.

SuperNova Award

Covid hit and put our plans on hold for earning the SuperNova Award, which ended up being really nice for Bear Year as we were able to cruise through rank requirements at our Bear Year Fall Campout. However, if you really want to work on that SuperNova during Wolf Year, you most definitely can and then you won’t need to earn it again during Bear Scouts. To complete the SuperNova during Wolf, you would need both Call of the Wild and Code of the Wolf. If you wish to work on SuperNova, just be sure to have enough time to complete each requirement as it is a rather long process. Also, you will need a special SuperNova counselor.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.