Summer Club Ideas

Summer is a tough time of year for contact work - and for club! So how do you keep the ball rolling? Here are a few tried-and-true ideas!

1) Graduation Club
Held at the end of June, right before or after all high school graduations. This club not only celebrates the high school graduates and is an appropriate theme for the end of the school-year, but it also shows girls that we value their education and them moving on in life. It's easy to decoration for this with graduation balloons and a "Congrats Grad" cake. For a craft each girl gets to decorate and fill photo albums with graduation, summer or camp pics. There are plenty of graduation/education-themed games to choose from - think Jeopardy, graduation word searches, etc.

We even do a graduation skit: Play the graduation song (Pomp & Circumstance) and have a mentor come out dressed in a graduation cap and gown. As the music plays she asks all of the recent graduates to stand up and hands them a YoungLives "diploma" (the diploma is rolled up and tied, it is really a $5 gift certificate to the store at whatever camp you are going to that summer)

For a club talk, we focus on "Graduating in our walk with Christ" (talk about girls taking the next step in their faith- like the next step in life after high school- when they choose not to turn back to the old ways of their life and choose to allow God to give them new life (2 Cor. 5:17)) You could also have a one of the girls who is graduating give her testimony if appropriate.

2) Planned Playdates
We always seemed to be hit and miss with our clubs for the summer, so this year a mentor "team" picked a month and they hosted two events each month - one daytime group playdate, and one themed evening club. We could use the playdate as intentional contact work time - and as a face-to-face time when we could invite girls back to club! We were able to get free passes to "PlayWorld" and a huge discount to "JumpZone" with just a few phone calls. 


3) Cookout 
We also invited all our girls, their parents and their significant others for an outdoor cookout. It was the biggest hit ever!!! We had a small fireworks display at the end, but mostly just a lot of fun with bubbles, with blankets on the ground to keep it kid friendly. We all brought our lawn chairs and the mentors signed up for food to bring so we had plenty.

Thanks to Dusty Linn-Conway and Anneke Brown for these summer-y ideas!