Shopdropping

I saw this article on "shopdropping", the reverse of shoplifting, where people bring stuff into stores and leave it. This is sometimes done for art's sake, but what was more interesting is when it's done as marketing. I've seen marketing literature, particularly political ads, dropped in bookstores and other places.

I've had the thought of dropping invite cards for our church in the religion or even self-help sections of book stores but it just reminds me too much of a pushy street preacher shoving Chick tracts at everyone passing by.

But I haven't seen bands dropping their CDs. I think that's a cool idea, especially if they're clearly labeled as free, so a cashier doesn't have to waste 15 minutes trying to get it to ring up. If they're stuffed in the right locations, they could get to the people most likely to enjoy them and help build some buzz.

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Amazing Race Kids Activities

I've gotten a couple queries about the activities we used for our "Amazing Race" nights at Detour, our Wednesday night children's ministry. Since I recently went through the photos from that time, I thought I should try to make a more complete list. Credit for most if not all of these ideas really belongs to Sarah Morris.


Week 1:

• From a table filled with stuff, locate one particular item (I think a printed word) and point it out to a judge
• One team member eats a jar of baby food. We were nice and had fruit not peas. For the teams that lagged behind this got shortened to five spoonfuls.
  
• One team member pushes / pulls a stack of chairs across the room. This was harder than we thought. You should test the size of the stack with one of the smallest kids.
  
• One person from the team finds a specific verse in the Bible and sculpts the 3rd word of the verse from Playdoh for the team while they try to guess what it is.
• Given a sample greeting card and supplies, make an identical card (for nursing home residents)

Week 2:

• From a list of 30 names, circle the one that is not a book in the Bible
• From a table filled with toys, find one specific item and write down the location for a judge
• Balance a pencil on your nose for 30 seconds
• One team member eats a spoon full of mustard
• Take a popsicle stick and wrap it completely in yarn
• Something where the one team member got dressed as a Bible character and had to recite something. I can't remember exactly what this was, but it was funny to watch.
  

Week 3:

• Untie a rope with a dozen knots in it
• Unscramble 12 church-related word scrambles
• One team member stands on their head (against the wall or with someone holding their feet) while the others recite /sing something
• One team member eats a pack of pudding, fed to him by the rest of the team, with spoons in their mouths, and with everyone's hands behind their back. One of the funniest activities. Amazingly not very messy.
  
• A three-legged race down the hall
• The team got 5 balloons and had to pop them by sitting on them. The lighter kids couldn't pop them and needed some help.
  
• From a bowl full of eggs, the team must pick one at a time and crack it open until they find a hard-boiled one. I didn't get to watch (or photograph) this but I heard it was probably the most disgusting activity we had.
  

Week 4:

• The team solves a Bible-themed word search
• The rest of the team wraps one team member completely in toilet paper. The judging of "completely" got looser for the slower teams.
  
• Each team members puts Vaseline on their face and uses cotton balls to make a beard. Really funny to watch (and photograph) but probably the messiest activity we did.
  
• Given a stack of magazines, the team cuts out and glues letters on paper to spell Jesus.
  
• Make a balloon animal. Judging of "animal" got looser for slower teams.
  
• One team member drinks a small baby bottle full of water. This took fooorrrrevvveeerrr. You should test this with a kid and consider use a small amount of water like a quarter of the bottle. Great photos of teams standing around in frustration watching one poor kid try to suck down a whole bottle through a pinhole.
  

Week 5:

• Assemble a 100 piece jigsaw puzzle. This took too long, probably nearly 10 minutes per team, even with the whole team working and adults helping. The kids were ready to explode.
  
• One team member drinks a small amount of pickle juice. We even watered it down. This was the only time we ever had a kid puke from an activity.
• String 25 buttons on a string
• Walk down the hall holding a spoon in their mouth with a pom pom ball on it without dropping it

We had a couple challenges every week, besides just coming up with ideas. The kids, especially the older ones, could just blow through challenges much quicker than we thought. So we made sure to add activities that would have to slow them down like word searches and puzzles. Then we had teams falling way behind that wouldn't finish without help. It's very tough to work out a balance for everyone. What I'll do when we do this again is make sure to have some adjustable difficulty so we can slow down the fast teams without stopping the slower teams. Things like having a hard and easy version of a word search or word scramble or having a 100 piece and a 25 piece jigsaw puzzle would accomplish that. That takes a little more instruction for the volunteers though.

Speaking of volunteers, this activity can be very volunteer intensive. The setup (and teardown) took a lot of work of course. We (Sarah) had to walk through and make sure that the clues the team receive sent them to the right rooms in the right order. There also had to be adequate instructions so that any volunteer could walk in and run the activity. During the activity we often needed volunteers in 3 or more rooms at a time. If you do this, you'll definitely want to have one or more designated photographers. Some of our funniest photos came from these nights.

One challenge we had was with the competitive aspect of the activity. We had a couple kids get frustrated with "losing" but the majority of them were having too much fun to worry about that. The bigger problem was with the fast teams of older kids. They were so competitive that every week we had accusations of cheating. That wasn't fun to deal with. Especially since everyone got the same prizes at the end.

When we did this activity last year it was only one of several activities kids could sign up for at the time. We had about 5 to 6 teams of 3 kids each week and that was a good number. We tried to limit it to kids that were 2nd to 5th grade so they were decent readers and could understand and follow the directions.

Update: Peppers and Pollywogs has a list of activity ideas meant for birthday parties.

Update: I created a quick hopefully non-infringing logo for this blog post, using this photo as a base. You're free to use it for your own personal use as long as it is clear that this is not affiliated with The Amazing Race television show.


[The Amazing Race is a trademark of CBS or the production company for the show. I was told that we were cleared to use the term "Amazing Race" as long as it wasn't The Amazing Race and we did not use a logo from the show.]

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Detour Talent Show and Christmas Party

Tonight we had a Christmas Party at Detour (our Wednesday night children's ministry). This year we tried something a little different: A talent show. No prizes or awards or judgement. Just kids showing off their talents. We had the usual piano playing, singing, dancing and boys telling jokes. A couple gymnastics. A karate comedy routine. A yo-yo routine. A singing dog. Kids with last-second stage fright. It was a kid's talent show all right.

But what amazed me was how many people turned out. Not just kids, but parents. We had almost 50% more than our usual number of kids and this is the time of year that our attendance usually drops. We'll definitely have to try the talent show idea again. It was no where near the amount of prep time of our other special event nights. The only thing I didn't like about it was that it didn't really give kids or parents a feel for what we normally do at Detour. Something like Adventure Night or the two twists on "PJ night" we've done (have to blog about those) are a lot closer to our typical activities.

Adventure Night

This year, Halloween fell on a Wednesday. For the first time since I've been involved in children's ministry here (6 years now) we hosted a Halloween alternative, Adventure Night. We sort of borrowed from the Epcot World Showcase and created five rooms, one per continent. Each room had crafts, games, activities, snacks, gifts, and candy. Snowball fights (tissue paper), snow cones, Chinese hats, crowns, rain sticks, boomerangs, fortune cookies, and much more. The only bad news about the event is that we only had 27 or so kids. It was a start though and maybe something to build on for next year. Even if we don't offer a Halloween alternative again, the "around the world" theme came together well and I'm sure we'll pull it out again for a special event.

Respektör

The latest trading card. This is our first non-kid source drawing. Scot Nusekabel did the original and it's pretty much intact on the card. I did re-tint the skin (and legs) and make the face a little friendlier. I'm pretty happy with the image, but the overall card didn't flow as well as I'd like. The drawing is great but once it was on the finished card, it's not what I'd envision as a "super hero trading card". The printing had some mottled colors in the shaded red areas, so I suppose I needed to go ahead and airbrush down the texture in the drawing or completely re-shade it.

The background is again pretty simple, but a medieval or fantasy feeling background was just too distracting and this guy would be out of place on a modern one. The calming blue doesn't help, but it looked the best against the drawing.

The name is kind of a last minute pick from a hundred ideas that were even worse (Hector Respector? Mr. Respect?). To top it off, the back of the card had a typo.

Super Initiative Man

Meh. Here's the second trading card I did. It's ok, but I really wanted something bold and dynamic. This guy is very classic 1950's comic book retro and I don't think he pops off the card as much as the first card did. In retrospect, the blue background is just to calm and peaceful. But with that much red in his suit, not many other colors worked as a background. I'd started a non-abstract background with buildings but wasn't going to be able to finish it in time for this card. Plus it added too much gray given the gray cape, which also covers so much of the background that it would have been a waste. To top it off, somehow this card was printed slightly larger than the last one, making it look like the card was a full bleed that had a trimming mistake, instead of having the regular white border of the last card.

Again I just didn't put the time into it that I wanted to. Hopefully with most of a month ahead of me I can get the third one going in time to mostly achieve what I want. I've got three decent sketches of female superheros but we're trying hard to keep it exciting for boys. I think I'm going to divert more substantially from kid's sketches and just use them as rough ideas.

Super-Responsibility Strength Man

I just finished this for church. It's our first of a series of super hero trading cards, loosely based on the 252 Basics virtues. It didn't come out too bad, considering that I only got to spend about 5 hours on it. The basic character shape is modified from an online superhero creator. I wasn't too happy about doing that without copyright clearance, but the site encourages people to share their creations, take screenshots, etc. so I think they implied permission to use it in a non-profit way.

Here's the original concept drawing from one of the kids. I think I captured his intent. I've got a half dozen more concept drawings for other cards. If I spend the time on them I might be able to develop an actual comic style, which I've never done. I didn't even doodle comic character sketches as a kid.

CERT / CERF

Tonight I dropped in on local CERT / CERF meeting. Several people from our church are now CERT-trained volunteers.

I'm not.

I've seen and worked with CERT members some over the last couple of years but I guess I didn't realize the training and expectations of them. I had the vision of them maybe doing some damage assessment, spreading information, passing out bottled water and ice. Maybe just a step beyond the Red Cross volunteer. But, at least from what I saw, they're really geared towards urban search and rescue. It was weird watching a team of volunteers from church practice "cribbing" (shoring up, then lifting, debris off of someone using scrap wood) and searching inside a hazardous building.

I shrugged my shoulders and joined in for a search and rescue exercise. I crawled around on the floor in a dark room, unsuccessfully trying to avoid potential electrical shock, and dragged out another volunteer. It's funny to me to hear that voice in my head saying "this would be too dangerous", given all the places I've been as a Red Cross volunteer. At least there we didn't go anywhere that the fire department hadn't cleared. CERT's a whole different niche in disaster relief.

Maybe I'll keep showing up for CERT / CERF training and play the spontaneous untrained volunteer. Or finally find the time to take the training. After I finish my ARRL AREC classes and FEMA stuff. Taking a 6-8 hour class every Saturday seemed a lot easier before kids.

When I got home I was thinking out loud, "I can't see myself going off an volunteering to do that." Ten seconds later, "but I sure could see myself doing that for a neighbor if we had a tornado." That's CERT in a nutshell, I think.

Good Idea at the Time

Something I've really learned this year doing Detour (our Wednesday night children's ministry) is what a difference there is between doing something with 2 or 3 kids and doing something with 15 or 25 kids. A couple of weeks ago we thought paper mache pinatas sounded like a good idea. Sure it's a little messy, but water and flour sounded much easier to clean up than some of the other messes we've had, like corn starch/water/food coloring goop or some of the different food activities the kids have done. I could think back to memories of making a few paper mache objects with my parents and brother and it didn't seem that messy at the time.

Fast-forward to tonight. Holy moly. 25 kids from pre-k to 5th grade all slapping newspaper and paste everywhere. An entire bowl of paste spilled. How do kids get everything in their hair? In the past 10 years I don't think I've ever managed to accidentally wipe some ick from my hands into my hair. I think I have to go back to c. 1991 when I had a problem removing a stubborn oil filter.

Fear Factor

So this month at Detour we've been doing a version of Fear Factor where the kids have mostly had to endure some disgusting challenges. For week one we had kids finding gummy worms in green Jello with their hands behind their back. I have great pictures of green slime all over their faces. The next task had one member of each team holding a sardine in their mouth (since none of them would eat them) while the rest of the team solved a puzzle. I couldn't stay in the room because the smell alone made me queasy.

This this week we had live crickets. The task was just to reach into a cage full of them and retrieve fake bugs. Before they started, I said "I bet at least one of the boys will eat a cricket." Sure enough, two of them did. I'm sure we'll get some love letters from parents after that one. But the kids ate it up, so to speak.

What makes me so happy we're doing this is when I get to see a reaction like the one I got from one girl. I'll call her "April" for the moment. It's a long story, but April has some special needs. One challenge with April is that every week she switches to a different activity and "hates" each one. The only activity she's stuck with was our version of The Amazing Race two months ago. Well here she was, getting ready to go into our Fear Factor activity with live bugs. I just wasn't sure she was going to be able to handle it. I checked on her often. The first time she said she was so grossed out that I was ready to take her out and see if we needed to get her mom. Then I realized that she wasn't at all interested in leaving. She had a blast, being grossed out. Success.

Tampa Bay Festival

I think you'd have to been living under a rock to not hear about this weekend's Tampa Bay Festival at the RayJay stadium grounds. I bet I saw 5-10 signs, bumper stickers, billboards, banners, etc. every day.

I went on Sunday with my daughter, mostly to catch the kid's zone. It was kind of interesting to see kids lining up and almost battling over getting to do games and other activities that aren't that different than what we do pretty regularly at our church. In fact, it was mostly our church volunteers in the kid's zone. There were others there but in the kid's zone I'd guess that 4 out of 5 volunteers were from Van Dyke. Pretty cool to see.

We did get to catch the last Livin It show of the festival. It was pretty cool because I'd gotten to see Steven Baldwin talk about this ministry almost two years ago, and here I was seeing it in action. It's been a long time since I've seen BMX jumps live. I probably haven't seen them since I was on a BMX bike. The motorcross jumps were pretty amazing to see, that close, especially with the wind. Still, the most amazing thing to me was listening to Christian Hosoi talk. Not only is he a (former?) pro skater, but he was able to talk about his descent into drugs and eventual arrest and 5 year prison sentence. The crowd was pretty quiet by the time he was done.

It was getting pretty cold, so I didn't battle the crowd at the main stage but I guess I just missed Tony Dungy. So he really did speak both days, which I guess was sort of up in the air for a while. Everyone was asking if (and when) he was going to speak. He was definately a crowd favorite, so it's great that he came out both days. I'm sure he did a great job.

Detour: Amazing Race

The month of January was "Amazing Race" month for the children at Van Dyke. At Detour (our Wednesday night kid's service), one of our activity workshops was themed similar to the popular adventure race television show. For four weeks, each night kids raced from room to room, performing activities like:

• Completely wrapping a team member in toilet paper
• Assembling a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle
• Using spoons held in their mouths to feed pudding to another team-mate
  
• Drinking a baby bottle full of water (very time-consuming)
• Solving word-scrambles, identifying bible names, etc.
• Eating baby food
• Drinking pickle juice
• Finding a hard-boiled egg in a bowl full of unboiled eggs

It was crazy to watch but it was one of the most exciting pieces of children's ministry that I've ever seen. My daughter's team finished nearly last every week but still had a blast. I learned a lot of new things about various kids just watching them interact under pressure -- things I'd never see if they were sitting at a table listening to a bible story.

I think my proudest moment was the first night when one of our most difficult kids tried this activity. Every week she tries something different and by the end of the night, she tells me that she hates it and wants to do something different. This was the first time she finished the night and said she loved it. Another first: she came back to the same activity the next week.

Almost all of the credit for this goes to Sarah Morris, who jumped on this activity idea and ran with it. It was amazing to watch her juggle 8 rooms of activities and clues to send kids racing back and forth. This was so successful that we're working to pull together another activity similar to "Fear Factor" for March. We've already had kids asking about it.

["The Amazing Race" is a trademark or something of CBS or some production company. We asked and received clearance from them to use the term "Amazing Race" and our own logo, but we could not use the term "The Amazing Race".]

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Social Norms

Not too long ago I caught an interesting podcast from NPR's A Moment of Science about social norms (listen to the MP3 here).

Psychologist Robert Chaldini described how there are two types of social norms, descriptive norms and injuctive norms. A descriptive norm informs by way of example or suggests what is commonly done. An injunctive norm directs us toward what ought to be done; toward what is socially approved or disapproved. It all sounds pretty boring and psycho-babblish, but once you understand the implications, it is surprisingly useful.

If I think these norms in the way things are marketed, especially around our church, I can see why many marketing campaigns fail. For example, we regularly tell people that they "should" get involved in a ministry area or a small group. Yet we know for a fact that people almost never get involved in anything because they "should". It's almost always because one or more friends invite them or especially when they see many people that they know getting involved. The "should" is the injunctive norm and just doesn't have much of an impact on people. The "everyone is doing it" is a descriptive norm and is the one that really has an impact.

I can really see the difference when I look at campaigns we've run, even if I just look at what my reaction to them has been. I assure you that when I hear anything like a "you should ..." or "we'd like everyone to ...", I don't respond in any positive way. But when I hear things like "250 members already signed up ...", it really gets my attention. I really didn't make a firm commitment to joining a small group until I realized that most of the guys I knew at church were in one. Whenever someone invites us to an event, we want to know who else is going. I almost skipped my second men's retreat a couple years ago but decided to go after looking at the list of who else was going.

The worst thing we can do, and we've done this repeatedly, is to try to encourage people to go by announcing that not many people have signed up yet. If anything we need to say that we may run out of space.

www.MyLameLoveLife.com

It took me about 5 exposures, but I finally had to go look and see what this www.MyLameLoveLife.com was that I was seeing in yard signs, bumper stickers, etc. I'm not sure why I didn't guess that it was a church, but sure enough, it was. Good hook.

Detour, Week 2

We had our second night of Detour this week. Overall, things went a little smoother, but even the first week wasn't very chaotic. We had a few more kids for homework help and tutoring, which is great. I think that will really continue to grow. I had to fill in again for science and since I had a boy the first week that really wanted to learn about light bulbs, we did light bulbs and electricity this week.

I started with some different batteries and measuring the voltages on them. Then I took a 6 volt bulb and applied the different voltages to it so they could see how bright it was. Then we applied more and more voltage to the bulb until it finally died. It took almost 20 volts from some some pretty high-current sources (a big AGM lead-acid battery and a pack of NiMH rechargeables), but it finally burned out. Then we talked a little about what's inside the light bulb that burned out. One of the kids even beat me to it and told everyone else that there's no air inside the bulb. Then I did the demo that I was worried about. My big lead-acid battery, jumper cables, and some steel wire. I knew I should have put down some foil or something to catch the hot wire, but I didn't. The wire burned to a crisp immediately and fell right on the table-top, melting a nice line into the new table. Did you know that light-colored Formica table-tops have only a thin layer of light material over a dark base? I do now.

Then I went on to talk about different conductors and resistance. The big demo there was dropping some clip leads into a cup of water and adding salt until the light bulb lit. It started sort of cool for the kids, especially since they'd played with chemistry the week before. But then they got a bonus electro-chemistry demonstration as the tin plating dissolved from the anode alligator clip and the water turned an "awesome!" brown color accompanied by a steady stream of bubbles. I knew I'd get a little of that, but I didn't think it would be that much. They thought it was cool.

Then my big finale was passing out little LED keychain lights (RadioShack clearance). We had a little talk about being responsible with lights and electricity, then it was time to go.

We had a somewhat disappointing attendance this week and might have even had a few less kids than the week before. But looking around the room, I could tell that we had a lot of different kids this week than we had last week. Something I've learned is that there's no good way to predict or even understand attendance fluctuations like that. Sometimes we just have a "down" night where even a lot of the regulars miss, and we usually can't explain it.

I'm pretty excited about the future of Detour. We keep hearing great comments from kids and parents and people keep coming up with good ideas for 4-week workshop topics for kids. We've got some really great ones lined up for later in the year, especially in the spring when more teachers can make the commitment.

Detour

We had our first night of Detour last night. It's our new Wednesday night children's ministry at church. It's sort of a cross between our old Pioneer Clubs and WorshipU and is loosely based on the Workshop Wonders book. The kids start with a large group time. Last night we had about 5 middle and senior high youth come and talk about what "responsibility" (our virtue for the month) means to them. In the next few weeks we've got a lot of different guest speakers lined up each time. Then we did some praise and worship music and broke out into our activity groups. This first time we have a Lego builder's club, preschool art, cake decorating, dog training, science lab, homework help, and tech team (the lights, sound system, video, etc.). We didn't have many kids for the homework help, but I know that will pick up in the next few weeks. We have an amazing set of volunteers waiting to help and tutor, so nobody should have to stay home on Wednesday nights because the kids have too much homework.

I had to fill in at the last minute for the science teacher, so we mostly worked with vinegar and baking soda. Most kids past first grade have seen it bubble over and half of the kids had built the typical volcanoes. So I filled up some Ziploc sandwich bags and got them to explode, which was a little more exciting. I didn't get time to find some soap bubbles to try another trick I'd read about online yesterday. You build up a big pool of CO2 in a dishpan or some other tub. Then you blow soap bubbles over it. The CO2 is heaver than room air and tends to stay in the container pretty well. Since the bubbles are filled with room air, they'll float on the CO2 layer instead of sinking. It sounds neat enough that I still want to go back and try it with the kids. Maybe next week, but I think we're going to do electricity, light bulbs, LEDs, etc. Maybe some radio stuff?

Last night went pretty smooth considering that it was the first night. A lot smoother than the first night of Pioneer Club last year. I heard that we got a lot of positive feedback from parents and kids. The new remodelled space for the kids is looking amazing and it's still not quite finished. I really need to get some photos as areas get completed.

Deford: "... we are sinners."

Frank Deford argued in this NPR segment that the government should legalize, regulate, and tax sports gambling. It's an old argument that comes up with regard to vices that laws have failed to stop. What was interesting though was Deford's somewhat different spin on it.

Maybe it's a sin to gamble. Okay. But it's an even greater sin not to accept the fact that we are sinners. The government ought to book that bet.

I thought that was an interesting new-but-old take on this argument.

Happy Mother's Day

This Mother's Day marks 6 years that we've been coming to Van Dyke United Methodist Church. I never would have guessed I'd still be there 6 years later.