Youth Workin' It

Consultancy and Resources for Youth Workers and Organizations Worldwide

Preparing For Christmas – Youth Work Session Idea

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Preparing for Christmas youth work session ideaIt’s less than 10 weeks until Christmas, something that seems to have come around way too quickly. It’s therefore worth making plans for any special programming or events you want to run during the holiday season, particularly if you haven’t started already.

Instead of being the sole person deciding on what activities you do at Christmas, why not involve your young people – this can help your young people in making informed decisions, encourages youth participation and helps them gain important life skills.

To help get you started, here are a few suggestions on how you can get your young people involved:

1. Fundraising

Christmas is a great time to organize a youth group fundraiser, so here a few ideas for how to do this:

Involve your young people in deciding what type of fundraiser to organize, how to plan it, when and where to do it, its promotion, etc.

2. Partying

Organize a Christmas party, but one that’s planned by the young people themselves. You could put them in charge of:

Make sure they’re also included in the less fun parts too, like the cleaning up after!

3. Volunteering

Christmas can be a miserable time for many people, whether that’s due to poverty, loneliness or some other factor. Encourage your young people to get involved in the local community and to make a positive change in the lives of others – they’ll find that they’re the ones who benefit the most.

4. Planning

Once Christmas is over, it’ll soon be the New Year. Depending on how far out you’ve already planned, the weeks leading up to Christmas could be a great opportunity to discuss with your young people what issues they’re currently facing.

The answers you receive can then help guide your programming for the forthcoming year, ensuring that the topics you cover will have a true resonance with your youth.

Question: How do you involve your youth when preparing for Christmas? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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Goal Setting For Teenagers – Youth Work Session Idea

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Goal setting for teenagersGoal setting for teenagers is an important life skill. It can be challenging (like helping young people make informed decisions) because adolescent brains aren’t as developed and therefore can’t always reason out every possible consequence to their choices. But when you see teenagers set and achieve goals, it can also be very rewarding.

This week’s youth work session idea is therefore all about how to teach goal setting to teenagers. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Define goals

Have the youth identify physical goals (e.g. soccer goals, field goal posts, the net in basketball, the bulls-eye in archery, etc). Next, help them identify goals that are more abstract, like getting good grades, graduating from high school or raising money for a trip.

Consider the steps to achieving a goal

These steps can be found in Teaching Social Skills To Youth from the Boys Town Press. Have the teenagers complete each of the activities:

  1. Decide on your values and desires – figure out what you want
  2. List the resources you’ll need to fulfill these options – list what you’ll need to in order to make it happen
  3. Examine the steps to accomplishing your overall outcome – organize the order of the steps you’ll need to take on the journey to your goal
  4. Create short and long-term goals to accomplish your desired outcome – create mini-goals to help large goals seem more manageable

You might find that working through SODAS and helping youth create SMART targets are good ways to help them identify and quantify their goals, making them more achievable.

Create the goal

Get the young people to create their goal in some way. This could be by:

  • Drawing the goal
  • Making a poster
  • Making it out of clay
  • Drawing out the timeline of steps they need to take

Anything to make the goal more tangible and to serve as a visual reminder of their goals.

Identify obstacles

Talk about the obstacles that can stop youth from achieving their goals. Consider making an obstacle course that the group needs to navigate as a part of reaching their goals.

Give the obstacles names like ‘dropping out of school’, ‘listening to the haters’, ‘underage drinking’, ‘getting suspended’, ‘getting an ASBO/Juvenile Record’, etc.

Inspirational quote

When talking to teenagers about setting goals, consider this quote by Jon Acuff from his book Quitter:

Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.

Have the youth discuss what they think this means. Encourage them to set their goals with that in mind: that they’re right where they need to be and that they have something valuable to contribute just because they are themselves!

Question: What activities would you do when looking at goal setting for teenagers? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below

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Teaching Respect To Teenagers – Youth Work Session Idea

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Teaching respect to teenagersYoung people (and adults!) through the ages have had trouble respecting others. Today’s youth work session idea looks at ways you can approach teaching respect to teenagers and how to help them consider this issue more deeply.

Do & Don’t

One of the first steps in teaching respect to teenagers is to get them to think about people who they do respect and who they don’t.

To do this, divide a sheet of paper down the middle, with “Do Respect” on one side and “Don’t Respect” on the other. They should then think of all the different groups of people they know and place them in one of the two columns. This could either be done together as a group on some flipchart paper or individually on their own sheet of paper.

If they have a hard time thinking of different groups, here are some ideas to prompt them (not all of these may be applicable to your teenagers):

  • Brothers/sisters
  • Parents
  • Friends
  • Boyfriend/girlfriend
  • Teachers
  • Police
  • Social workers
  • Neighbors
  • Youth workers
  • Sports coach
  • Pastors
  • Movie stars
  • Pop stars
  • Sport stars

With movie stars, pop stars, etc, have them name specific celebrities, as this will help with the next section.

Why?

Now that they have a list of people who they do or don’t respect, the next step is to find out reasons why they feel that way about each group / person. Encourage them to be as specific as they can – instead of a reason being “Because they’re stupid”, have the teens elaborate on reasons why they think the group / person is stupid.

This can give you far more insight into why the young person may have such a hard time showing respect to certain people. For example, you may find out that the reason a young person hates the police so much is because they arrested their father for physically abusing them.

As this section could lead to personal and sensitive information being involved, it might be worth getting the youth to write their reasons down individually, so that it’s only you that will see their answers.

Who?

The next part of teaching respect is to reverse the situation. Ask them to list people who show them respect. You could in theory have them list people who don’t show them respect, but by focusing on people that respect them will help this part of the session remain positive, particularly as the first couple of steps could have been challenging for the teenagers.

As this is a more positive section, it should be OK doing this as a group rather than individually.

How?

Now that they have a list of people who show them respect, ask them for examples of how these people show them respect. Again, ask for specific examples – instead of “Because they’re nice to me”, try to have them explain exactly what it is that’s showed them respect. This could be their tone of voice, smiling at them, that they praise them when they work hard, etc.

Benefits

The next step when teaching respect to teenagers is to explore the benefits from both sides. What are the benefits when somebody respects them and what are the benefits when they respect others? For example:

When someone respects me…..

  • When my Dad respects me, it makes me happy
  • When a teacher respects me, it makes me work harder
  • When the police respect me, I don’t want to insult them
  • When my boyfriend respects me, it makes me love him more
  • When my sister respects me, it makes me want to play with her more

When I respect someone else…..

  • When I respect my teacher, I won’t get a detention
  • When I respect my sports coach, it might make him more likely to pick me for the team
  • When I respect my Mom, she won’t shout at me
  • When I respect my girlfriend, our relationship will get stronger
  • When I respect the police, I won’t get arrested for being mouthy

This activity could be done by giving each young person a pen and some post-it notes to write down their thoughts. These could then be stuck on the flipchart next to each person / group if you’ve been using a flipchart.

Positive Actions

The previous activity will hopefully have helped your teenagers to start internalizing some of the benefits of showing respect. This step will help them internalize ways that they can do this.

Provide each young person with some post-it notes and a pen (if they don’t have them from the previous activity). Get them to write down three ways that they could show respect to each person / group that was listed in the first activity, regardless of which column they were listed in.

On the flipchart, write each person / group on a separate sheet. Once the youth have come up with three ways to show respect to each person, have them stick the post-it notes around their name on the flipchart. Read out all the different options as you go along, so that your teenagers are teaching each other how to respect.

If they have a hard time coming up with ideas, explain that they could show respect through things they say or do, or maybe even things they don’t say or do.

Challenge

Finally, set them a challenge – to intentionally show respect to every person /group listed over the course of the next week (or until the next time your group is due to meet).

At your next meeting, get the youth to report back on how it went by asking some questions. These could include:

  • Who was it hardest to show respect to?
  • How did you show respect?
  • How did they react?
  • How did you benefit by showing them respect?
  • How did your relationship improve?

Try to focus on the positive as much as possible and celebrate their achievements, as this will encourage them to continue showing respect.

Question: What other tips do you have for teaching respect to teenagers? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below.

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Join Caine’s Arcade In The Cardboard Challenge

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Caine's Arcade Cardboard ChallengeOn October 6, 2011 (we featured it in April) the world was introduced to Caine, a nine-year old with a fantastic cardboard arcade. His creativity has sparked a foundation and global movement towards innovation and advocacy for youth, highlighting what young people can do.

Caine’s Arcade now has a second video which shares about the Global Day of Play and the Cardboard Challenge in which youth from around the world are invited to create their own cardboard activities or items.

It can also be a fundraiser for the Imagination Foundation which works to ‘find, foster and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in youth’. Your youth can have the opportunity to work creatively and help others through this global challenge and fundraising event.

Watch the video below to learn more:

Question: How might you use the Global Day of Play and Cardboard Challenge to inspire your youth to think creatively, have their say and make a difference?

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How To Help Teenagers Plan Meals

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How to help teenagers plan meals
I can almost guarantee your young people’s shopping list won’t look like this

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at how you can help provide life skills for teenagers – the first was by giving them tips for when they go food shopping and last week we suggested an activity to help them stay within a food budget.

This week continues on that theme by helping youth combine the skills they’ve learned in those two sessions with knowing how to plan meals. (n.b. We’ve also published another meal planning session plan in the past, so use that to help give some additional tips).

Weekly meal plan

Have your young people make a list of all the different foods they like. Once they’ve done this, give them a print-off of a calendar month and have them allocate different meals to different days. If you want to start off easy, you could just have them schedule a week’s worth of food; if you’re feeling ambitious, go for 2 – 4 weeks.

Ensure that they plan breakfast, lunch and dinner, along with snacks they may like to have during the day. Remind them to also include beverages.

Ingredients

For the next stage, give each young person some post-it notes or pad of paper. Have them research online all of the ingredients they’ll need for each meal – sites like allrecipes.com are useful for this. On each post-it note or sheet of paper, they should write the name of the meal and the ingredients needed (including size/weight/number of ingredients).

Let them know that many recipes will be based on feeding 4 or more people, so they may need to adjust ingredient sizes accordingly – have some calculators on hand to help with this. Suggest that making larger portion sizes may be no bad thing though, as they can freeze down leftovers for future meals.

Shopping List

Now that they’ve identified all the ingredients needed for their meals, it’s time to collate them in a shopping list. To help them, offer the following tips:

  • Include size/weight/number of items that you’ll need
  • Don’t duplicate items. For example, many recipes will require cooking oil, but they’ll only need to buy one bottle, rather than one bottle for each recipe
  • Remember to include beverages
  • Where possible, try to group similar food types together as this will speed up the shopping trip. For example, try to list fruit and vegetables together, rice and pasta together, frozen foods together, etc.

Shopping Trip

For this next stage, give the youth a hypothetical (but realistic) amount of money that they get to spend on food for the week/month. Take them to a grocery store with their lists and have them shop for all the items they need, but don’t put the products in a shopping cart (unless you want to put all the items back afterwards!).

Provide each of them with a calculator. The objective is for them to total up the cost of their meal ingredients and to compare to the budget you’ve given them.

If they stay within the budget, great! If not, ask them what they think they can do to lower the amount they’re spending on food. If you’ve run the previous session on grocery shopping, they’ll probably put two and two together and try to find some cheaper brands. Another option they may have would be to find cheaper cuts of meat.

Spend Money To Save Money

A further suggestion could be that they might need to spend money to save money. For example, it might cost $16 to make a giant batch of chili, or they could spend $10 on two frozen pizzas. On the face of it, the chili looks like the more expensive option. However, if the batch makes 8 portions, each meal effectively only costs $2. This means that for the cost of eating pizza twice, they could afford to eat chili five times.

If a trip to the grocery store isn’t feasible for your youth work program, are you able to help them research the cost of the items online? This isn’t really an option here in the US where ordering groceries online is still in its infancy. In the UK though, you could have the young people set up an account on the Tesco website, enabling them to check food prices quickly and easily.

Question: What else would you include in a session on how to help teenagers plan meals? We’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments below.

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