For a while now my Beaver colony has suffered from a problem which I am sure hits all leaders at some point: Unacceptable behaviour. I’m not only talking about loud noise and low attention levels, but also verbal insults and physical violence (of a mild sort, sure, but I still don’t want it in my colony, thank-you very much!) Thus my leaders and I came up with a solution which has, so far, worked rather well.

We devoted two separate evenings to coming up with some colony Golden Rules. The first evening we talked about good and bad behaviour and then asked the Beavers to write down two examples of good behaviour and two examples of bad. We then used this to create a board game: I had already drawn out a game board on to a large (1.5 m x 1.5 m) square of card and left the squares blank to fill in. Most of the rest of the evening, we used the Beavers’ ideas to fill in the squares with actions such as “Didn’t listen to our leader, go back 3 squares” and “Said thank-you, go forward 2 squares” – discussing with the Beavers how bad or good the behaviour was (as reflected by how far you have to move your piece). This game has gone down very well, and the Beavers have asked to play it every meeting we’ve had since!

The second evening we played the game again to remind them of model behaviour and then as a colony came up with some agreed rules. All of the rules show the positive behaviour (“Dos” instead of “Don’ts”) and this works rather well. We also introduced a cuddly Beaver toy, named Castor, who goes home each week to the best behaved Beaver.

Throw in some standard behaviour management techniques, such as counting down from 5 to 0, insisting on silence before continuing instructions and drawing attention to the rules when things begin to get out of hand – and behaviour at our all-boy colony is almost perfect!