Detour Water Night

Tonight was the last night of Detour. For the third year in a row, we ended with Water Night. Water slides, soapy slip-n-slides, sprinklers, squirt guns, etc. This year we had the addition of a fire engine, thanks to Michael Kelzer and Oldsmar Fire Rescue. He sprayed 2500 gallons of water on the kids. Well, kids and adults. I think between me and Julie, we caught at least 500 gallons. "Did you feel like a big rain cloud was following you all night?" He also sprayed the kids down with foam (baby shampoo).

No major issues. A couple girls that didn't meet the "no two piece suits or bikinis" rule. A couple bumped knees and heads, especially on the slip-n-slide. Someone apparently took the wrong shoes home and lost-n-found gained a half-dozen pairs of shoes, some towels, and some assorted clothing. A few families showed up not expecting Water Night, but we've been promoting it for weeks through almost every channel we had available. Even the little kids seemed to handle the night well. Lots of extra volunteers helped out, which made it run as smoothly as it's ever run.

Thanks to everyone involved. I really need to do at least one wrapup post for the year or the last two years, to review what did and didn't work as we tried different takes on children's ministry workshop rotations.

Dangerous Things for Kids to Do

I was just watching Gever Tulley's talk on Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. I wish we could pull off some of these at Detour. Parents would freak. This is also a good list for homeschool parents.

His list:

1. Play with fire. We sort of did this when we did an outside "camp out" for boys earlier this year. They didn't get to really play with the fire that much but at least there was an open flame. I mostly remember playing with fire in fireplaces and the grill when we were growing up.
   
2. Have a pocket knife. Yeah. Not gonna do that at church. I think I got a pocket knife before I started school and have carried one almost my entire life. I bought a My First Swiss Army Knife for my daughter a year or two but she hasn't even used it. Maybe I need to make time for it.
   
3. Throwing a spear. I disagree with this one a bit. There are plenty of other opportunities for kids to throw things.
4. Take apart appliances - try to figure out what the parts could be and do. We've done this some during the Robotics break-out at Sports Camp but we could do a lot more. We could really do this at Detour. I've wanted to take apart a bike and maybe a lawnmower engine before but the messiness keeps me worried.
   
5. Break the DMCA - he says it's important that kids understand that laws can be broken by accident. This is one I don't really want to touch. It's hard enough to stay legal and comply with copyright law at church without intentionally breaking it.
   
6. Drive a car - legal in a big empty private lot. I got most of my early driving experience before I had a license but driving pickup trucks around the Renaissance Festival while I worked there. Not going to happen at church.

What would I add to this?

1. Go outside. It's really not that dangerous.
   
2. Play with electricity. Keep one hand in your pocket and you'll live. I grew up with model trains so I was always playing with AC and DC power.
   
3. Eat your own cooking. Kids today can grow up without ever cooking anything from scratch or even seeing anything cooked from scratch. Amazing.
   
4. Go places you're not allowed to go. That door that says "Do not enter" is calling your kids. What's behind it?
   
5. Talk to strangers. I encourage my kids, especially our daughter, to talk to strangers, within reason. She's become a lot less shy about placing her own order at Chic-Fil-A and is one of the few girls in her brownie troop that I've seen really approach strangers to sell cookies.
   
6. Eat wild food. Most of it won't kill you. Raspberries and their relatives are easy to find if you can beat the birds to them.
   

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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.

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.

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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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.