Red Rock Canyon Hike

During our Spring Break Week, we took our members on a hike to Red Rock Canyon.  

It’s only a few miles down the road from the El Pomar Unit, and a hike I’ve personally been excited to take the kids on for a while now!   Red Rock Canyon has a lot of trails to adventure around, with some pretty amazing views of Garden of the Gods.  The kids had oodles of fun leading the way, exploring the paths, and climbing on rocks. 

We’re hoping this will be a regular trip to take during our summer camp!

Torch Club

Torch Club is an amazing opportunity to teach youth about community service, leadership, responsibility, and character.  It’s specifically for youth between the ages of 11 and 13, and it also just happens to be a program that I run at El Pomar (Mr. Myles and Mrs. Heather run it at Tutt).  We’ve had a few Torch Club meetings already this year, and thus far, we’re having a lot of fun!

Recently, the Torch Club from both El Pomar and Tutt had the opportunity to assist some of our amazing volunteers and club staff in a club clean up.  While volunteers and club staff cleaned out a few of our HUGE storage closets, the two Torch Clubs came together to pick up trash around our clubs, as well as give our Art and Power Hour rooms a good scrubbin'!

This was an opportunity for our middle schoolers to prove they've got what it takes to make a difference in their surroundings, and boy did they do an outstanding job!  Our lawn and fence looked spotless :).

We celebrated afterwards with a BBQ and fun games outside.

Cheers to Torch Club, our amazing volunteers, and club staff for making this day a complete success!

SMART Girls

SMART Girls is one of our most popular programs.  Between Tutt and El Pomar we have about 40 young ladies involved, from ages 8 and up.  SMART Girls makes sure the girls of this generation are making the right decisions.  It’s a wonderful way for girls to: form a bond with one another; to talk about what’s going on in their home lives and at school; to discuss important issues like body image and emotions, friendships and relationships; and last but not least, it works on developing self confidence.

Ms. Sherrell has taken charge of Smart Girls in an amazing way.  The girls are always excited to sign up for the new season and see what she has in store.  This season’s program opened with a tea party. 

Cups were decorated for each girl, yummy tea was provided, as well as cookies and cucumber sandwiches. 

She also had the girls pass around a special package that was wrapped in about 20 layers of tissue paper. 

In the middle of the package was a prize, but in order to find out what it was, each girl had to unwrap a layer of tissue paper from the package and pass it on to the next girl.  The girl who unwrapped the last layer received the prize!  There was a lot of anticipation between the girls on who would be the last to unwrap the package.  Inside was a HUGE Crunch Bar.  Yumaroo!

Recently, Ms. Sherrell had the girls work on dream boards.  These boards help them visualize their dreams in a very literal way.  Look how amazing they turned out:

We plan to hang these up in a section of our club, and we’ll be sure to inform you when they are up (with plenty of pictures to prove it)!

St. Patty's Day Parade

We had a fabulous time at the St. Patty's Day Parade through down town Tejon last weekend. This years amazing float was designed by our good friend Cara.  With the help of staff members, club volunteers and club members, the float design was able to come to life!  Take a look for yourself:

Can you say "glitter"?  It was definitely easy to spot this beauty from a distance as it hovered down Tejon.  We had about 80 kids show up to support us and be part of our float.  Some walked with banners and some took a ride on the float itself! 

Our Teen Safe Driving Program was spotlighted as well.  Many of the teens manned a booth in Acacia Park, from 9am - 2pm.  The Teen Safe Driving Program is sponsored by Allstate, which encourages teens to learn about the dangers of distracted driving, with a particular emphasis on getting hundreds of teens and community members not to text and drive. 

At our St. Patty's Day booth, Allstate provided us with a huge banner.  Our goal was to get people to pledge not to text and drive by putting a blue thumb print on this banner.  By the end of the day, we received 996 pledges -- that's a lot of thumbs!

Even this guy signed:

Thank you!

We also passed out thumb rings that read "txting klls" as well as candy with spiffy slogans on them.  For instance, a 100 Grand candy bar read, "Your life is worth more than 100 Grand! Don't text and drive!"

Our teen members also emphasized a campaign dreamt up by themselves, "LID" or "Later I'm Driving".   They asked hundreds of parade-goers to text "LID" before stepping into their cars so that family and friends know not to text them while they are driving. To top it off, each teen member wore a bright orange shirt which starred the "LID" logo.

It was an exciting day for all of us and we are so happy it ended up a success!  Thanks to everyone who worked so hard on the float and at our booth, as well as those who pledged not to text and drive!

Picture of the day:

School Performances

We’re lucky to have a few schools close to the club.  During the fall, we attended two performances at one of our local elementary schools.  The first was a musical performance based on Lewis and Clark.  Many of our members had key parts in the performance.  When the show ended, we gave each of our members a flower for doing such a great job!

We also attended a holiday orchestra performance.  Many of our members participate in a strings orchestra, which consists of cellos and violins, while others participate in a separate orchestra which includes many other instruments. 

Here is one of our members performing a saxophone solo:

And coming soon, a post about Bristol Elementary's Circus performance!

Goofy Golf

We recently put together a day of “Goofy Golf” for our members.  We turned our learning center, art room, and gym into a miniature golf course, but instead of the normal putter and golf ball, we made things a little goofier!

Some holes used hockey sticks and hockey pucks, others used a baseball bat and a baseball,
while some had scooters to sit on and funny garments to wear. 

Our last hole was the goofiest of them all: members had to use a hockey stick to hit a plastic bowling ball into 10 pins (in the hopes of knocking them all down, of course!). 

We split the members into groups of four, and each group had a designated score keeper (we created some pretty silly scorecards for them). 

We’ll definitely be doing this again!

Welcome to Foodopolis

One of the latest additions to our club is Foodopolis.  This is part of the club where our members eat snacks, drink juice, and enjoy sitting amongst friends at our large tables.   We had members color pictures of their favorite fruits and veggies, then we hung them from the ceiling as a colorful reminder of healthy eating habits.  And yes, those are indeed crazy straw hanging from the ceiling as well!

BOARD GAME MANIA!

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we turned our whole gym into a GIANT board game. 

We used pieces of colorful paper to cut out squares.  The squares formed a path from one end of the gym to the next. We wrote special commands on some of the squares: “roll again”, “lose a turn”, “move two spaces forward”, etc.  Poster sheets were used to create huge trivia and activity cards, while a cardboard box was covered in construction paper to look like dice. 

Kids were used as the “pieces” and placed in teams to walk on the "board." 

The trivia cards incorporated questions about Martin Luther King Jr. and African American History. 

The activity cards consisted of challenges that incorporated teamwork, for instance:  keeping a bunch of balloons in the air for a minute;

challenging a staff member to jump rope contest (that's me!);  

or getting every single person on your team to score a basket with a football in under a minute.

Here is the winning team!

Christmas Events

The fall holiday season may have ended a month ago, but really, who doesn’t like to talk about holidays???  During the month of December, we had a few special days planned for our members.  One day included decorating sugar cookies, and another focused on making ornaments out of popsicle sticks. 

But the star of our holiday season was our Pajama Jam Party!  Our members stayed at our club after the normal hours because we had a spectacular night planned for them (while their parents got to have a few extra hours to themselves).  

We started out the night with a Pickle Hunt. Yes, I said PICKLE HUNT!  We taught our kids about the German tradition of the Christmas pickle: each year, a family hid a pickle somewhere on the tree, and the first kid to find it Christmas morning received an extra gift. This German tradition inspired our Pickle Hunt.  We hid one pickle somewhere throughout the whole building, then split the kids into teams of five. The first team to find the pickle received a prize!  But the catch was, they had to stay with their team throughout the whole search (no splitting up)! 

Explanation of Pickle Hunt:

Pickle Hunt Madness:

After the Pickle Hunt, we decorated gingerbread houses made of graham crackers:

While others enjoyed playing a game of hockey in the gym or one of our favorite games, Baby Food Roulette.   Baby Food Roulette incorporates, wait for it… BABY FOOD! It’s a game that is much like hot potato.  Members stand in a circle.  One member starts out with a plastic spoon.  When the music starts, the spoon is passed around the circle.  When the music stops, whoever is holding the plastic spoon, must blindly pick a jar of baby food from a bag, take a bite, and then they’re out! We played this game back in October as well, and it was a HUGE hit with the kids, so we had to be bring it back. Who knew baby food could be so tasty???

We also had some delicious pizza and chocolaty chocolate milk for dindin.  Yummy!

J Aren’t holidays the best? J