It saddens me to see a season end, but thrilled to see how God will use His young disciples I have watched grow in their knowledge of Him and personal history with Him. We just celebrated the end of the season for CLUB345. These are our 3rd – 5th graders, so I technically get to play and pray with them for three years before they head off into middle school youth group, confirmation, and beyond.

We meet on the 2nd and 4th Sundays of the month from August through April. The schedule looks like this: 5-5:30 snack meal, 5:30-6 games, 6-6:30 lesson, 6:30-7 response activity. This year we used Abingdon Press’ Live It! curriculum on Family (last fall) and Making A Difference in the World (this spring). We’ve had special guests who are ministry colleagues who actively engage the students with their toolbox of goodies relating to something they are passionate about. We’ve gone on field trips to other local churches and had them come to ours to give our kids a ‘big experience’ that is always more fun with more, giving them the experiences of our connected system.

We just celebrated our last night of the season with a special guest who spoke of ‘what we need to live’ and we prepared and learned about UMCOR (United Methodist Committee on Relief) Sewing Kits. We ate dinner from a taco bar and enjoyed what we call, Wesley Chapel’s Got Talent when any of the students are free to perform a talent.  We even had one juggling this year!  We invite the youth to attend the talent show and then make a presentation of a gift.

The gift is a framed copy of their name in scripture.  I purchased the inexpensive frames from IKEA (3 to a bag) through Amazon.  Then used gift bags purchased from Hobby Lobby for the background using my handy-dandy paper cutter.

I have a huge list of scriptures that I’ve gathered over the years to copy and paste that begin with each letter of the alphabet, some with multiple scriptures because the letter is used multiple times. I choose the ones I think offer wisdom and hope as they enter middle school.  If you’d like a copy of the list, send me an email to dedereilly@comcast.net.

For 2017: Our end-of-year celebration will look like Color Wars at camp since we learned about the life of David with Crayons. I also ordered black frames from Amazon to order in larger quantities and they look fabulous!

What do you do for the end of the season?

“The end of a thing is better than it’s beginning.” Ecclesiastes 7:8 KJV