What do we do?

We provide opportunities for children and young people to learn, grow and discover in a safe, fun and caring environment which is rooted in the Christian faith.

We run our standard night on Friday nights during term time, more about that below!

There is also a monthly parade service (usually the first Sunday of the month); we expect young people to try and attend these(and their families are more than welcome to join us!).

There are extra optional competitions and ev ents run at various times throughout the year.

Friday BB Night

Each Friday night is different to provide an interesting and varied programme for the young people. Quite often we have a theme for the night to tie the night together. The general itinary for a Friday night meeting is as follows (with examples from a Vegetable themed night):

Opening

The opening represent the formal part of the meeting and lasts about 20 minutes.

First the young people fall-in and stand to attention. A young person is selected to have the honour of being the flag boy or girl for the evening. They fall out and raise the flag to mark the start of the meeting.

A leader delivers an opening which includes an important lesson/message and often encompasses a faith element. On our Vegetable themed night we discussed the importance of eating vegetables in our diet and how it we must keep trying vegetables, even if we prefer other things. This led onto a faith element by watching a video on the Parable of the Sower.

The opening concludes with a uniform inspection – points are awarded for the correct uniform, having clean hands, having a tissue and attending parade services. The points add up to earn prizes.

Badge Work

The second part of the night focusses on the awards programme (~30mins). We run activities to earn credits towards their badges.

More detailed information about the awards programme of each section can be found on the Boys’ Brigade website (links: Anchors Awards, Junior Awards, Company Awards, Senior Awards).

We make this as fun, varied and interesting as possible. The badge work covers, lessons, crafts, art, games and challenges.

In our vegetable themed night we revisited the Parable of Sower by having a quiz where the young people had to run around to find the right answer. We learnt about which vegetables grew above ground or underground (and other facts) using a small parachute. We then played a guess the vegetable game where vegetables had to be identified without looking.

Games

The third part of the night is the games (~30 mins). Which is pretty much what it says on the tin! Often we can transition into games from badge work seamlessly.

The games can be anything from the old favourites games like Traffic Lights and Croc Creek, to Team Games or Skipping. We also have facilities to play table tennis, pool and badminton.

On our Vegetable themed night we played “Vegetable Soup” where each young person was allocated a vegetable and had to race around the group when their name was called out. After using the small parachute for the badge work, we decided to play a few games with the very big silk parachute.

Closing

We finish our meeting by falling in and the flag boy/girl lowering the flag.