Burns Night & Lunar New Year

This week's meetings were all about celebrations. The younger sections travelled north to learn about Burns Night. They had a traditional address for the haggis, then made their own out of chocolate and biscuits. Auld Lang Syne was sung, we coloured in flags and a map of Scotland, as well as creating our own tartan pattern and playing games.

Addressing the Haggis

Chasing games

Creating our own tartan

Making sweet haggis

From Scotland, we skip all the way across the world to Asia to celebrate Lunar New Year with the Cubs. It's widely known that the holiday is celebrated in China, but we learned it's also observed in Vietnam, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore. We also looked on the world map to find out where all the countries are.

We watched the story of the zodiac animals and how they raced to determine the order the years would be named. If you're interested, you can find it on the Cbeebies YouTube channel. We liked the fact that the video was short and simple to follow, even if it was for younger people.

After that there were chopstick races where we were trying to move cotton balls and Lego bricks from one end of the table to the other in teams before turning our hand to something creative by making lucky red envelopes and paper fortune cookies.

Where in the world celebrates Lunar New Year?

Chopstick races

Addressing lucky red envelopes to someone at home

Sharing the pencils

Not only did we celebrate Lunar New Year at Cubs, but we also had Sam with us for his first meeting after moving up from Beavers and two new friends attend and will hopefully return next week. One of them might even be the first Scout!

So that's the final meeting of January done, the longest (so it feels) month of the year is over and we move into the shortest, but also the birth month of our founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powell. For now, though, we'll sign off and see you next week! Don't forget to check out our socials to keep up to date!