Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

After months and months of club, you, your team, and your club kids might be ready for a change. Here are a couple ideas you can use in the last couple weeks of the school year:

1. Leader panel

This is mostly a replacement for the club talk. For more details see this post, complete with cards you can print out.

2. Senior led club

For this club we simply hand the club over to the seniors and say “you got it!” We make sure there are some junior leaders working on most of it. We ask one or two seniors to give their testimony at the end of the club. They always love this, just be sure to give them enough time to work on it, especially with how busy they get near graduation.

3. Best-of club

For this club we make a poster and put it out a few weeks in advance. Kids then vote on their favorite games and skits from the year. Then you simply re-do the ones that are their most favorite. You can find more details here, including a poster you can use.

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In the beginning of each semester our club does a planning meeting to plan all of our clubs. One of the keys to quality brainstorming is to not rule out an ideas (initially). We vote and then I add some input to make a final call. So, when we had our planning meeting in January and “Kentucky Derby Club” was suggested by one of our awesome junior leaders I wrote it on the white board and moved on. Then they votes and, to my surprise it had a lot of votes. I tried to suggest I didn’t think it would produce a lot of excitement among students and was pretty random, at least for our community.

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A few weeks ago we had a lot of fun with mom club. Several people came dressed up like a mom, no offense to you moms out there. We also had some cookies when kids showed up. You could have some milk too to make it special. When kids were arriving we played the song “Stacy’s Mom” in the background. That might have been a little sketchy but YOLO, jk. I am trying to use YOLO for the next 48 hours before it is “sooo 48 hours ago”.

We started off club with the pregnant balloon pop mixer. For our game we pulled up a few boys and some young ladies and told them it was a kissing contest, the boys would be blindfolded and then they would need to describe, in detail, the kiss. After the guys were blindfolded we brought in their moms. They kissed their moms and described it. We picked kids (and moms) that we thought would have fun with it but wouldn’t get too silly with it. Obviously we had to arrange this a few days early with the moms, but the guys had no idea. It was a ton of fun, lots of laughs, and kids were talking about it for days at school. It also gave us a good opportunity to have a few moms come and check out club.

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I’ve done a few skits in my life and one thing I realized was that a key prop or outfit can make the whole thing work. One time I was doing a program for a YL camp and I simply went down to a fantastic costume store and decided I would just do a program around the best outfit I could find. I think that one ended up being a rapping parrot named P-Thug.

Anyway, I was online a few weeks ago and saw these and I instantly knew we had our camp sell skit. They are a bit expensive, but I bought two. It was worth it. They lent themselves perfectly to a lumberjack type of a skit. That brought to mind the old SNL skit Hans and Franz.

So for our camp sell skit we adopted a bit of this Hans and Franz attitude. The skit is one experienced lumberjack (a skinnier guy), showing a rookie lumberjack (our biggest buffest leader)  how to make the cut (pun intended). One of their key lines is that they are going to be “Lumber-Jacked!” 

We are going to Malibu for the first time as a club ever this summer, so we have added a Canadian theme as well. Lots of “eh” and C-A-N-A-D-A jokes. Each week they come out and tell us how to prepare to come to Canada and how to get Lumber-Jacked for camp.

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Love it or hate it, the term “hipster” is everywhere. Who else could leverage the hype and still take a well-deserved shot at the silliness of it all than a Monday night YL club?

This is an easy one to ask kids to get into: scarves, beanies, flannel, thick-rimmed glasses, fixies, yes I know I am describing probably the majority of the people reading this blog right now so you won’t even have to dress up!

Here is a video for inspiration:

Here is the club plan:

Here is the video we pretty much copied for the skit:

Last, but not least:

http://hipsterorhomeless.com/

If you need ideas right away, go to the bottom of this post for a link to the best resource to date on theme clubs.

A few weeks ago (before the post) we had our semester planning meeting and came up with some outlines for our clubs. Here is what we are thinking right now:

Jan 16 – Volleyball hangout

Jan 23 – All Area Club

Jan 30 – Hipster Club

Feb 6 – Progressive Club

Feb 13 – Valentines Club

Feb 20 – No school, no club

Feb 27 – Leap year club

Mar 5 – College Club

Mar 12 – Superhero Club

Mar 19 – Spring Break, no club

Mar 26 – Mom club

Apr 2 – Kentucky Derby Club (seriously, my leaders wanted it)

Apr 9 – All AZ Club

Apr 16 – Canada/Malibu Club

Apr 23 – Mock Prom

Apr 30 – Messy Games Club

May 7 – PJ/Pillowfight Club

May 14 – Senior Run Club

May 21 – Year End Party

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I’ll keep this short and sweet. Post It Note club will stick with the kids for a long time. If you got the pun in there then you would probably like most of my jokes because they are almost all like that, really punny.

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Last night we did a fun club, iClub. Basically everything had some kind of technology or Apple twist to it.

The mixers was a Words with Friends type game. Everyone got a label with a letter and point value, put it on their forehead and then the guys played the girls by making a word, lining up and grabbing a knee. To do the game you will need this file I made with letters and points, print it out on standard address labels.

Then once again we used the wonderful Polleverywhere web site to do live polling via text message. We did:

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Get your neon gear and leg warmers out… it is time for 80’s workout club! It worked out pretty good (get it?). The only challenge was calming the kids down due to all the energetic events. We could have used another song or two before the talk that were a little more chill to help transition the students so they were more ready to listen. Other than that it worked out just fine (get it?).

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This might sound confusing, but follow along… last week we did Young Life, Young Life club. So basically a club with a “theme” of “Young Life”. We did this near the beginning of the semester to somewhat introduce some of the newer kids to a little intro to YL. We asked kids to come in any YL gear they might have. I also save up random leftovers from previous camps and such and gave them away during club, especially to the newer kids. We also had some of our junior leaders do the “If I Weren’t In YL…” skit.

Here is our plan and also the video of the skit.