Who Scouts in a place like this?

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely. 
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers. 

Setting up this activity

• Print the ‘Global Beaver Scouts puzzle pieces’ onto card or thick paper. Alternatively, you could print them onto paper, then cut them out and stick them onto card.
• Cut the sheets into pieces to make a jigsaw puzzle. Think about how many people will be in each team. You should make sure there are at least enough pieces for everyone to have at least one each.
• You can make the game easier or harder by cutting the jigsaw into more or fewer pieces. 
• If you think you’ll need more than four groups, prepare more than four jigsaws. You can just use some countries twice.
• Shuffle each jigsaw up, then put them in their separate piles at one end of the space.

 Play the game

1. Gather everyone together. Explain that you're having a jigsaw relay race to learn about different counties around the world.
2. Get everyone into four teams (or more if needed).
3. Each team should line up at the end of the space opposite the jigsaw puzzle piles. You may want to use cones or markers to show their starting point. 
4. When the game starts, the first player in each team should go to their team’s jigsaw puzzle pile. They should pick up a piece and take it back to their team. When they get back, the next person in the line should go.Everyone should continue collecting the pieces, with the person at the front of line going as soon as the person before them arrives back.
5. As soon as a team has collected at least two pieces of the puzzle, they can start piecing them together. Once each player has collected their puzzle piece, the team can put the puzzle together. The last person to go should check that all the pieces have been collected—depending on the size of the team, some people may need to go twice.
6. Once the puzzle is finished, each group should read the information on the puzzle to learn more about another country. They should think about what’s similar and what’s different to their experiences in Scouts.

Share facts

1. When everyone's ready, gather back together in a circle.
2. Each group should tell everyone the name of the country they were given and some of the facts they learned.
3. You could give each group a world map, so they can see if they can find the country the other groups are talking about.