Ideas and inspiration for planning your St George’s Day celebrations
St George’s Day is traditionally a time for Scouts to come together, renew their Promise and celebrate.
You may be planning to run an event as a group, District, County or Area, or you may be preparing to do some activities with your section. We’ve pulled together some inspiration, ideas and resources to get you started.
Why do we celebrate St George’s Day?
We celebrate St George’s Day because Baden-Powell chose St George to be the patron saint of Scouts. He wanted St George’s Day to be a time to reflect on the Scout Promise and what it means to be a Scout.
You could use our activity, A soldier, a saint, a Scout?, to test your group’s knowledge, and find out more about St George.
Renewing your Promise
St George’s Day is a great opportunity to reflect on and renew our Promise. You can find all of the versions of the Scout Promise.
You could run a local event and renew your Promise together. You may also want to bring lots of people together from your wider area on a digital platform and Renew your Promise online.
You could take some time to reflect on what the Promise means – and tick off the Promise and values parts of your section’s World Challenge Award at the same time.
You may want to try one of our Promise activities, such as:
Get creative exploring the legend of St George
Looking for some creative inspiration?
- Get started with a roar by creating your own dragon. They could draw, make a collage, make a mask or make a spoon puppet.
- Try making this clay dragon with English Heritage.
- Design and make your own shields
- Make a sword with English Heritage
- Make your own props, then challenge everyone to act out the legend of St George and the dragon.
- You could play a fun game of Dragon dodgeball
- Try this wide game and escape the dragons in Dragon dash.
Depending on how everyone chooses to get creative, they may be able to tick off parts of their Creative or Entertainer Activity Badges (or their Skills Challenge Award).
Shout about Scouts
You could use St George’s Day to spread the word about Scouts and how it helps young people gain skills for life. You might want to:
- Run a bring a friend event
- Choose to wear your Scout scarf, with permission from their school or college
- Update social media profile pictures to show them wearing a necker
- Run a community action project
Make an international link
Did you know that Baden-Powell hoped that celebrating St George’s Day would ‘bring all Scouts the more in touch throughout the world’?
With this in mind, why not reach out to another group abroad? Over the last few years, groups have been meeting up online. With new and improved digital tools and skills, it might be the perfect time to get to know some new faces. We’ve put together some general guidance on making these international links.
If you’re able to connect with another group, you could ask whether they celebrate St George’s Day where they live, or whether they have a special day to celebrate a local patron, historical figure, or a local myth or legend.
Remember to think about how you’ll tell them about St George’s Day and what it means for Scouts in the UK too.
Stop and reflect
You may not have saved your community from any dragons recently, but what other things have you done to help?
St George’s Day's an opportunity to pause and reflect and we’ve got plenty to think about this year. Some ideas might be:
- Making your own flip book
- Look back on the year with Look back and snap, Paper memories or My adventure scrapbook
- Reflect around a campfire
- Recognise the impact you’ve made this year and plan what you’d like to do in the coming year.
Celebrate awards
St George’s Day is a great time to celebrate badges and awards people have earned. Plenty of people have achieved great things, so why not run an awards celebration locally? It can give everyone a boost to focus on how people have overcome new challenges to achieve amazing things. Hearing about people’s successes can encourage everyone to keep going with Scouts.