7 member activity ideas for Explorers

We know our members have tons of creative ideas of things to do with Explorers, so we’ve pulled together the best of the best to give leaders some easily-accessible inspiration.

Before you begin

Make sure you’ve risk assessed your meeting, and also have a COVID-19 safe risk assessment that’s been agreed by your line manager.
Use the Safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity.
Consider if they’re suitable for the restrictions in your area based on the current readiness level.
Check out the advice on using Zoom (as well as other popular digital platforms) and staying safe online.

Here’s the top seven socially distanced and online activities we found that you could try with your Explorers.

Socially distanced activities

Mindfulness walk

Leader Leanne has come up with a brilliant idea: using an acronym for Scout to incorporate aspects of mindfulness into a walk.

S is for scenery
C is for collecting
O is for offline and observation
U is for unwind
T is for touch

A mindfulness walk involves everyone making a conscious effort to stop every now and again to really pay attention to where they are and what they’re doing. It helps young people to relax and connect to the natural world.

Find out how to run a Mindfulness walk on the activity finder.

Orienteering

Karen’s suggested orienteering, which is a great chance for young people to brush up on their map skills and could count towards the Navigator Staged Activity Badge. Each group of young people could use a compass to make a trail with instructions to find tags attached to trees. Then they could swap trails and find each other’s tags by following the instructions.

Just a minute

Just like the BBC Radio 4 show, ‘Just a minute’ is where contestants try to talk for a minute on a given subject without repetition, deviation, or hesitation. Other contestants challenge to take over when someone makes an error. You need a judge and someone to keep track of time and scores. Thanks Mark – this one could work online too.

Activities you could do on Zoom

We dug out some excellent activity ideas from the 1st Virtual Facebook group – make sure you check it out if you haven’t already. There are handy filters you can use to find activities related to your section.

Make yourself look like a famous person doing an unlikely activity

Watch the video here.