Weekly Planning - Week 1 - All About Me

 I love themes! I believe they help us stay on track and incorporate fun and diversity in our Club experience. This school year I have revamped our daily schedule to be a group effort between our YDPs and our Unit Director at our Riverview Club (where we serve 1st - 3rd grade kiddos). 

Our theme for Week One is All About Me. This gives the opportunity for Club members to get to know each other and reconnect with old friends.

Day One is a group activity where each member creates their own puzzle piece and we can use these to create a wall display featuring the members of each group. You can find this project on Scholastic Teachables.

Day Two is part of the Healthy Habits program. We have created at pre/post test survey for use with grant monitoring. If you would like a copy of this to use with your site, just send me an email at jwood@bgcottawacounty.org.

Day Three is a Career Interest Survey that is part of our adapted Career Launch program. Since the national program is designed for older kids, we have adapted and created a program that fits with the age of Club members we serve. The survey that we use was created by College Foundation of North Carolina and is designed for elementary age kiddos. If you would like to use the same survey, you can find it here.

Day Four is a project from the Youth for Unity program. We use this program along with Smart Moves for social / emotional learning. 

Day Five is an adaptation of a project I have used during my days as a preschool teacher. I have found the easiest way to do this is to pair kids and have them work together tracing each other. If you have minimal space, you might opt to have members create a self portrait on regular size paper instead.

So, that's our first week in a nutshell. I'll be sharing our weekly program guides with our themes here as we go in case you want to adventure along with us.

High Yield Activity: Fruit Salad Toss Up

Are you looking for a fun way to liven up your Healthy Habits or TRAIL programs? This is a fun game to play with the kiddos to help them become more familiar with different fruits. As a bonus, let the kids make their own fruit salads by having a variety of fruits for them to select from to mix into their own salads.

Target Area: Program room with tables and chairs

Objective: Members learn about healthy snack options

Target Age Group: Ages 6-9

Time to Complete: one 45 minute rotation

Skills Taught: Healthy Lifestyles

Materials Needed: none for the game, a variety of prewashed bite sized fruits, bowls, and spoons for snack

Instructions:

Have the group sit chairs in a circle. Once person stands in the middle of the circle and does not have a chair. All players are assigned fruit names: apple, orange, pear, plum (use names of fruits you have for the fruit salad if you're doing the snack option with the activity). The middle person calls out one or more fruit names. The called fruits must change chairs. The middle player tries to sit in an empty chair before the fruits do. The middle person may also call "Fruit salad toss up" for which all players must change chairs. The player left without a chair becomes the middle person. Repeat the game as time allows.

World Vegetarian Day - Calendar Connection

I love finding holidays that inherently incorporate a food prep activities Our kids love hands on food prep and we are lucky enough to have a partnership that provides a weekly nutrition lesson that often incorporates a food prep component. In our part of the world, many families are still in the "meat and potatoes" mindset that determines a meal based on it's protein (my own family is no different and I can only imagine how they would eat if I weren't constantly asking "Where's the veg?"

To help expand minds (and palettes) we're going to try a few vegetarian recipes as well as to create our own Meatless Monday food prep booklets. Side note: I refer to these activities with our kids as food prep as opposed to cooking so that we can follow a natural progression. Small groups of older kids are allowed to actually utilize heating elements within our kitchen space, but younger kids are not. By using the term food prep, it helps everyone feel included, even though who do not utilize heating elements.

So, for our celebration of World Vegetarian Day, we will be making a simple (but super flavorful) Cheese Tortellini Vegetable Soup inspired by a recipe from Super Healthy Kids. I love a good soup recipe to welcome fall and also to give ample opportunity for lots of kitchen help. There are lots of veggies to chop to practice knife skills, browning to give a chance for heat source use, and lots of measuring for those who aren't quite ready for using heat or sharp objects. When we make this soup at the club I use pre-made, refrigerated tortellini and the flavors are phenomenal.

Of course, every good meal has a little something sweet to wrap it up and we will be finishing up with this no-cook Pumpkin Mousse from Dessert Now, Dinner Later that is dairy free!

Do you participate in Meatless Mondays? What are your favorite vegetarian recipes? Let me know!