After four years as an NCO I have been stripped of all my creative ideas and run dry of new ideas to make each parade night enjoyable for my cadets. Recently I have created escape rooms, inititive exercises and entered our sqn into a robot building/racing league. Yet, the pressure to keep the standard of learning and entertainment for the cadets keeps growing. I need help and ideas. I’m looking for activities I can do on the sqn with limited equipment and funds.
Engineering project: weather balloon ‘into space’, plenty of guides online - get cadets into smaller teams to plan and design a payload - put the budget together etc. Then build and launch.
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This might sound like cheating, but ive been around the block a few times and know this works.
Firstly, stop stressing about being new and innovative. You’ll burn out trying. Instead, go right back to basics and repeat them, find what works and repeat. Not over and over, but every few years.
Sounds silly, but the average cadet life span is about 2 years. You only need 2 years worth of product, then recycle them. Dont worry that some of the older ones may have done it before; they would’ve done it as cadets - not as NCOs/leaders - which adds a different spin on things.
Somewhere on here (link to follow) theres a list of stand alone ideas which work well for parade nights. Break up your year into seasons - we just do summer and winter program. Summer leans towards practical outdoors stuff. Winter towards classification training.
We have projects - rebranded as trade training - which helps give a 8-12 week project to work on. What it is will depend on your staffing and availability - but as an example, we’ve currently got Casualty Simulation, climbing (working towards NICAS), engineering and continuity drill. Previously we’ve had radio, first aid, canoeing, archery, fieldcraft, aeromodelling, arduino programming, flight sim etc. It helps hit the DofE box, but also helps give, for one night a week, ongoing development for 2-3 months.
We’ve additionally done the RAF100 stem activities, visiting lecturers, TaskMaster activities, Blue Leadership badge stuff, other Blue Badge courses, Heartstart, the Values and ‘P’ file stuff, the Climatic Injuries DVD etc etc.
Classifications over winter are run 3/8 evenings, so i top up with swimming proficiencies, hire an astroturf/sports hall for sports, got a local BMFA club to run a round the pole session, yadda yadda.
Oh, and im not saying i dont do new and innovative stuff - i just dabble in new stuff, find out what works and add it to the box, tweak it or abandon it if it doesnt work, or doesnt engage the cadets.
Take feedback from them. Our lot are often as engaged doing messtin masterchef, a role reversal evening or a spagetti and marshmellow tower exercise, as they are doing a complicated and resource heavy STEM exercise.
I’ll dig out the list of stuff i wrote on here which might give you some insights. Hope it helps and gives you some ideas!
Edit - try here; Winter Activities
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Definitely agree. You don’t have to get caught up reinventing the wheel every year.
Find what works and repeat. Assess if what doesn’t work could be adapted or scrap it.
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And write it down!
A little more work now means a lot less in the future when you want to repeat it
We keep activity folders which are added to when we try something different. Supplements lesson plans and works as a good back up reference for when it all goes pete tong.
Kept on a shelf in the office and organised by topic/subject/type.
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Given the lifespan of cadets you don’t need to be looking to do something new all the time. It’s just staff that feel they need to be doing something new and get stressed. TBH I don’t think cadets care a huge amount. Most of ours are cadet mates so seem to have a laugh no matter what.
Coming into the summer months we’ll be doing sports and nav exs on a regular basis, the latter we do backward or groups do half each. Last summer where it was so hot we spent one night every fortnight in uniform. The hut didn’t get cool enough to be in until about 8.30.
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