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

Those are just rough plans at the moment. But if you need a ton, I mean a ton of great ideas… See what Drew put together here… It is an incredible resource. You should bookmark it and come back to it often when you need club plans and ideas! Thank you so much Drew!

101 Theme Club Ideas at the Young Life Leader Blog

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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.

But seriously, this is a simple club, lots of fun, easy to plan. The skit takes some work, but we showed the original video (see the document) after the skit (but watch out for a stray word or two) and they laughed a lot then too.

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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:

• Best fast food place
• Favorite soda
• Best college
• Best mall
• Best sport
• Best rapper
• Worst smell
• Cooler YL leader (I lost to a cool college leader guy by a small margin BTW)

We did our normal announcements and introductions via Skype with leaders in another room. Then we did a skit which is basically the enlarging machine skit, but backwards so to speak. It makes everything smaller, the last thing being our biggest guy leader jumps in, and then out comes the smallest girl junior leader dressed exactly the same with a beard drew on, it was funny. She reappeared in the Skype announcements which was fun too. The video is below (if reading this in an email you will need to go to the site to see it).

Here is the club plan:

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PS I have a ton of things I’m excited to write about soon… Just in YL crunch time at the moment!

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

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1. I ask each leader to come with three new fully planned themed clubs (mixer, game, skit, additional fun things to spice it up)
2. I write all of their ideas on a board with minimal explanation (do this part quick)
3. We review the list to see if there are any obvious clubs that are basically the same, and then combine them
4. I have everyone take a piece of paper and write down their top 5 (you could do as many as works for you obviously)
5. This part may sound lame, but… I have them close their eyes and raise their hands as I say each club and I write down how many people voted for it (I don’t want people to think their idea was bad or know who did or did not vote for their ideas)
6. When we are done I circle the top ideas. This semester we needed nine new clubs.
7. Since I am the senior leader, I make some executive decisions about some of the clubs, but usually 95% of it is what we vote for.
8. We then break up into teams and plan the clubs in detail.
9. We finally come back together, explain our plans, tweak the ideas as a group and write them down.

This takes about 3 hours, but it saves you a ton of time during the semester so you can focus on prayer, contact work, relationships, team building, and all the rest. Hope that helps. Here is what we came up with, I will post the details as we type them up and fine-tune them.

If you need other great ideas you can also look here and here.

Oct 3 – Dub Step

Oct 10 – YL Club

Oct 17 – Bigger and Better

Oct 24 – Chipotle Club

Oct 31 – Halloween Club

Nov 7 – 80’s Workout

Nov 14 – Sock Club

Nov 21 – Turkey Club

Nov 28 – iClub

Dec 5 – Postit Note

Dec 12 – Duct Tape

Dec 19 – Christmas Club

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Several of my YL friends have recently done their own YL flashmobs. Here is one from my great friend Chris…

I think the key is to minimize driving, emphasize being polite, and keep it moving.

Here is the plan we used:

Here is our birthday song:

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I don’t need to say much more, but we did put together a fun club about Facebook. It is somewhat of a non-traditional club and relies heavily on a video projector, wifi, and kids having phones that can connect to Facebook. Enjoy…

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When I was in high school my leader and his wife hosted an after-dance dessert and pool party which was a ton of fun.

Another staff friend of mine did a cooked a steak dinner, complete with YL aprons for all the leaders who helped serve the food.

Here is this years Mock Prom Club…

You may have also seen my post on a club talk including prom.

What have you done to make the most of the school dances for your YL club?

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I have yet another great resource from Hugh in North Carolina!

In a past post I asked people for their input about weekend camp activities. Hugh mentioned the “Clubble”. The Clubble is Club in a bubble (of course).

Basically imagine club in a huge plastic tent blown up by fans.

Then inside of the “clubble” you can have club. The projector can simply be projected on the inside of the bubble. Also, since it is an enclosed place it is a great location to do a messy club. At Hugh’s club they have done food smashing skits with the sledge-o-matic (ala Gallagher for those of you who remember, or maybe you tried to forget).

I liked the idea so much that while I was doing program last summer at Lost Canyon I tired to get the whole camp into a clubble for the messy games. That didn’t work out but we did use it as part of the obstacle course. It was a ton of fun. The only problem is that Lost Canyon is in,well, a canyon, and thus it can get windy at times. So the clubble almost blew away a few times. We had Summer Staff holding the clubble down while kids were in it, sometimes in the dark… well at least we tried it.

Hugh was nice enough to give great detailed instructions about how to build a clubble, complete with links to the Home Depot website so you can see exactly what you need and the cost.

This could be a great event to do in the midst of a long Spring semester to mix things up.

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