February might be the shortest month, but it’s sure to be the busiest! Here are 28 ideas to try with your young people.
1. Kick off #YouShape Month by planning a Wear Their Necker event – young people step into the shoes of adult volunteers and get to be in charge.
2. Start a good habit. It takes at least 21 days to make something into a habit, so start now and your Group could be leaner, greener and cleaner by the end of the month.
3. Make the most of the last discounts to buy outdoor equipment for summer camp.
4. Go geocaching and find some treasure. Remember to put something in if you take something out.
5. Write down one achievable goal for each week of this month and work towards them one by one.
6. Sign up to A Million Hands, if you haven’t already, and make a difference in your community – like 81st Belfast Beavers did with their memory book project for dementia.
7. Play the Stay Safe game on Safer Internet Day, and have a look at some of the other great resources available for the Digital Maker and Digital Citizen Staged Activity Badges, developed in partnership with Vodafone.
8. Spring clean your meeting place. The modern word ‘February’ derives from the Latin term februum, which means ‘purification’ and refers to a Roman festival of purification or cleaning, which took place at this time of year.
9. Make suet balls for the birds, as they need extra calories in the cold weather.
10. Plant sunflowers, either in pots indoors or straight into the ground if it’s warm enough for you to sit on the bare soil without getting cold.
11. Learn to cook a dish that contains lots of greens. Before we got the modern name for February, historical names included the Old English Kalemonath, meaning ‘month of cabbages’!
12. Find the first snowdrops of the season.
13. Do a random act of kindness for a stranger.
14. Design a Valentines card.
15. Make a home for a wild animal, or spruce up an existing one, like a bug hotel or birdhouse, that might not be looking its best after winter.
16. Learn to make an origami violet, the official flower of February.
17. Go on a scavenger hunt in a city.
18. Try an adventurous activity in a swimming pool, like canoeing, water polo or sub-aqua.
19. Climb a tree and look for the first leaves unfurling.
20. Make up a nonsense poem about February, using this list of rhymes.
21. Sleep in the Scout hut and tell a ghost story.
22. Celebrate Founders Day.
23. Write a letter to your future self.
24. Start a conversation about inclusion and diversity by exploring what it means to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, to celebrate LGBT History Month.
25. Learn about lent and the story of Easter.
26. Run a bring-a-friend evening, to share how great Scouts is with more young people.
27. Hunt for frogspawn in a pond.
28. Flip the perfect pancake on Shrove Tuesday (and spend March 1st scraping the mixture off the ceiling).
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