Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

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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Last Saturday we planned out our Fall 2011 clubs. I’ve mentioned it before but here is how we do it:

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.

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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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At my club we love wiffleball. Every Wednesday our guys campaigners is called Wiffleball Wednesday. The first half we play an over-the-line version of Wiffleball in my backyard and then have campaigners.

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Next week we are having an All Area Valentines club. In the past we have done lots of fun things along the lines of the “dating game”. Here is something new we are going to try…

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My friend Amber from Malibu (California, not the resort camp where none of us can ever get assignments, work crew or summer staff at…But I’m not bitter) sent this great club idea along. If you didn’t catch the title, it is a spin on the Man vs. Wild TV show.

For our Man vs Wyld…Life club we met at a park (you could probably do this in a large backyard) after dark. Everything was done in extremely limited light or else in the dark. We had battery operated lights (they have strobe and spot lights that are surprisingly powerful!) from the dollar store that we used when we needed light. After playing sardines we brought kids to a lit place in the park for the raffle, announcements, new kids and club talk. I think you could do a cricket spit or gross food games with this club theme…our kids won’t do that so I didn’t put it in, although I think it would’ve been funny! We had a lot of fun and it was a really easy club to pull off. Make sure if you do it at a park that you get a permit so that the park officials and/or police don’t kick you out of the park after dark. Whenever a kid didn’t want to do something I would simply tell them that Bear Grylls would do it…that was a pretty good motivator! We did the following games (see the file below)

PS Amber’s husband in a sitcom on TV… seriously!

For some reason a lot of students I know like to pretend to be hippies. And then there are those leaders in Northern AZ that like to call each other “gypsies”. All that to say that being a hippy or a gypsy is all the rage right now, as they say, “all the cool kids are doing it”. We did have a great club with this a few weeks ago so I thought I’d pass it along:

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Over the summer I normally try to post a couple things that I learned over the previous school year. These are a little late, but I really wanted to pass them along anyway. Also if you have anything you learned from last year that you would like to tell me about, send it my way smcgever (at) pv dot younglife dot org

Usually when I need something that I don’t have I just Google it and start my search. I do this with things for club, things for my home, all kinds of stuff. I bet you do that too.

In my spare time I like to read Wired magazine and all kinds of other sources of technology information. One thing that tech journalists are always covering is the battle between Google and Facebook. Google has a monopoly on internet information. Facebook has a monopoly on information and access on your friends. So it dawned on me (and probably many of you too) one day, instead of looking to Google for information and stuff I need to get, why don’t I look on Facebook. For instance I wanted to sell my car and buy a different one. Instead of putting my car on Craigslist or Autotrader, I told all my friends on Facebook. The benefit is that they know me, for better or worse haha, but many of them know a lot about my car and probably have been in it before. So a few weeks later, my car was sold at a great price to someone who really needed it.

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This may be a little too late to use with pumpkins, but you can file this away for next October/November, or it might bring to mind a similar creative idea to do with kids.

Erin from Silicon Valley YL sent me this idea and said this… Read the rest of this entry »