Question:
One of the suggested Cub Pack themes for this year is on Fire Safety. Unfortunately, the recommended BSA activity for the Pack meeting has nothing to do with the suggested theme. I am therefore, creating my own Pack activity, My plan is to create a Fire Safety Quiz (see below). I will first have each Cub AND parent do the quiz alone, then they will do it as a family, and finally, they'll review it as a Den (Sixer). This is a 'fill-in-the-blank' quiz, and I'll have an answer sheet with separate columns for 'alone', 'with-a- partner', and 'as-a-Den'. I've done a more sophisticated version of this with a Desert Survival quiz in our Boy Scout troop. What I need is a good selection of questions (and answers). The collection below all came from the BSA Cub Scout Helps booklet for 1992-3. While I consider myself a reasonable safe person, this is not one of my areas of expertise. Can any of you suggest more or better questions to add to my list. I'll post my final Quiz for anyone that wants to down-load it. Keep in mind that the Cubs range in age from 7 to 10.

Answer: I attended a leader training at the child burn center, a special division of our children hospital in Zurich. It was impressive (I couldn't eat anything for the rest of the week). One of the things I took with me was that the two most common reasons for bad burn injuries (degree 3+) among kids in the cub scout age are liquid firelighters or other flamable liquids and fireworks. Firecrackers are particularly nasty because they tend to self-ignition. I know a kid from my visits in the children hospital, who had a full packet of the small firecrackers in his pocket when they went off, most probably because of an accumulation of static electricity. all 500 crackers exploded, burned his flesh down to the bone, and left deep burns all way down his leg (this boy won't be able to walk correctly anymore, his hips will hurt with every change of temperature and he won't be able to have children). So please, include a line or two on firelighters and fireworks. As a side note, you cannot prevent children from playing with fire -- whatever you say, they will be tempted anyway. What you can do though is minimize the risks that the game turns into a disaster by teaching them to manipulate fire correctly. For example, never carry fireworks or firelighters in your pocket of your belt bag; instead, use a bag or a box which you can throw away quickly if something happens.