Running a Club

The material I use is 'Youth for Christ's Rock Solid material. This is an excellent resourse as it deals with subjects which are relevant to young people, gives optional ideas including video clips, and can be adaptable to either a secular group or those more religiously inclined. In schools I go down the middle on this.

I always plan to have more material than I need. I always put the kids into groups. I always use a renumeratory system in the form of paper currency - in the case of young people - 'megabucks' (taken from Rock Solid's "how to handle your money" meeting). It is important that I never take megabucks off a team for wrong behaviour but rather use positive reinforcement.

I always open up with a 'luck' game such as random dice in which each team chooses a number by turn and if they get it right they get 20 megabucks -if not the others get 5. Also I may do 'random balloon' - I blow up the balloon and let go. Where ever the balloon lands is the team which gets 5 mbs. Silly but fun!

We then have a couple of group games - perhaps pictionary, categories etc. The best games are those that involve the whole team and relate well to the theme. Then we will perhaps have a work sheet or a code breaker. A code breaker is an easy thing to make with todays word processors. Simply make an alphabet a-z underwhich through copy and pasting change text to a dingbat font (I use Journal Dingbats 10).

That is the keycode sheet (laminate for continual use). Then on another sheet of paper type out the verse or statement you want them to learn, convert it to the dingbat font, and give each team a copy or two to convert back using the key sheet. Near the end I give a talk which generally lasts no more than 5 minutes which could develop into a discussion.

Then - 'Count up your megabucks!' The winning team for the session gets a Freddo bar + sweets while each of the rest get a few penny sweets.

Thats it in a nutshell said the squirrel:

• Random games
• Theme related skilled games
• Worksheet/questionairre
• 'crack the code'
• illustrated talk
• final fun game (if time)
• countupyour megabucks
• sweets and go!

For childrens clubs (see Fizzbang) it is much of the same thing but more adaptable agewise with games teaching etc. Also ... be flexible. Kids may want to talk about issues raised. ...and above all PRAY!