5 useful planning tools for your weekly meetings

You might have only just started winding down from the previous year, but the Summer break is the perfect time to start planning next term’s meetings.

Both The Scouts and Girlguiding website(s) have a wealth of accessible tools to help you make the most of your meetings by planning ahead.

Take a look at some of our favourites, and gather inspiration for your Group activities and meetings:

Online activity resources

The memories of fun activities that young people take part in when they are members of Scouting or Girlguiding often stay with them for life.

Getting out and about has various benefits for both your youngsters and leaders. It encourages teamwork, helps your Group to bond and can improve their interpersonal skills.

Here you can find activity suggestions for Scouting and here you can find Girlguiding activities. Both resources have all kinds of activity suggestions along with resources and further information to help you carry them out.

Programme Planners

Another online tool that can be really helpful are programme planners. These pages both have downloadable files to guide you as you plan your programmes, and have spaces for you to add your own information and easily adapt the plans for your Groups.

• For the Scouting planning page click here.
• For the Girlguiding planner click here.

Use social media for inspiration

Sometimes it’s difficult to find other volunteers to talk to besides the ones that you lead your Group with unless there’s a bigger meeting, outing/event or your Groups overlap. The chances you do, are often a good time to bounce ideas off each other.

Social media has made the distance between others much less of an issue and has improved communication across organisations and there are many online groups, pages and accounts to help.

Girlguiding members and volunteers can use Girlguiding for Members’ Facebook page to find and share tips and tricks, be inspired by other users and keep up to date with everything going on.

As for The Scouts, there are a number of other useful accounts and online spaces to do the same such as 1st Facebook Scout Group where users can post all kinds of Scouting related resources and messages.

Scouting and Girlguiding magazine

Many of you will be familiar with either the Scouting or Girlguiding magazines that are distributed amongst members and available online.

The magazines are filled with useful information, insightful articles and activity ideas to help you plan your Group meetings. As all past editions of both magazines are available online, you can also take advantage of the content in previous issues.

• Take a look at the latest issue of Guiding Magazine here.
• Find the newest edition of Scouting Magazine here.

What’s your favourite way to plan your meetings? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!