Tonight the Cubs had “EPIC” guidance for the Disability Awareness Badge! Oh and it also coincided with our “dress down” evening where the Cubs could come out of uniform if they brought some chocolate to be donate to the church tombola for fundraising – hence why the photos below show us out of uniform!

Thats right – because one of our brilliant Assistant Cub Scout Leaders, Sara “Oo”, is the Chair of EPIC Leeds, the Cubs had expert tuition on being aware of disabilities!

Sara had also arranged two disabled children, Susannah and Dennis to join us tonight along with their carers Amanda and Beth. This was to show our Cubs how young people with disabilities could join in and be effective members of the community. Indeed it was a pleasure to have them both with us and to say thanks we gave them both a badge at the end!

After I opened in horseshoe as normal and introduced the evening, I handed over Sara to run the evening. She started with a brief Powerpoint presentation explaining what a disability was and different types of disabilities. She also had examples of famous people with disabilities.

There were then four different bases setup in the room which the Cubs rotated through in their Sixes. Two bases covered Physical Disabilities – one where the cubs tried to draw a picture using their feet to hold a pen

… and another base where they tried using a wheelchair to go round an obstacle course and pickup bean bags – not as easy as it sounds when you don’t have full mobility!

The next base was related to Deaf Awareness – Sara had got some noise-cancelling headphones which cut at out a huge amount of background noise and Keego helped also by teaching the Cubs how to sing “5 Cheeky Monkeys” in Makaton

The remaining base was Sight Awareness – ably led by our new Young Leader, Taylor. We had the Cubs walk around the Church normally – which of course was very easy for them… but then we blindfolded them… and suddenly it wasn’t so easy to do anymore…

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… as this video shows:

Seems like this Six enjoyed taking part… and maybe even learned something!

As we try and do each meeting, we finished off with a game! Like football, but they had to stay on their stomach’s and just shuffle around the floor using their hands to bat the ball to the opposing team’s goal!

Huge thanks to Sara “Oo”, Cathy “Keego”, Patsy “Baloo”, Helen “Raksha”, Taylor our new Young Leader, and of course our invaluable Occassional Helper, Kay “Ziggette” for supporting and doing such a great job running this evening.

Awards: All the Cubs who were present tonight earned their Disability Awareness Badge after engaging so well! Well done everyone 🙂