Mother's Day - Youth Workin' It

Mother's Day crafts for teenagers At the time of writing this Mother’s Day is still 5 weeks away, but many countries celebrate it throughout the year and so, while you may not need this session plan right now, you may need it in June if you live in Kenya or August if you live in Thailand.

We thought we’d give you a chance to get crafty with your teens so they can make something homemade for their mothers, step-mothers, godmothers or any other ‘mother figures’ in their lives. And overall, these will probably go over much better than that clay ashtray from when they were 4.

So here are 3 Mother’s Day crafts for teenagers:

1. Paper Flowers

You can have the teenagers make one or more small paper flowers or you can decorate your youth center or church with giant paper flowers. Having done them before, they do take some patience and fluffing, but once you get good at it, they’re beautiful. Quick tip: don’t make the center string or tie too tight.

The other great thing about this craft is that it requires very few resources – some tissue paper, scissors and a pipe cleaner or string are the minimum for a regular paper flower, although the large ones also need a tray, some paper clips and some hot glue.

Here’s a video guide on how to make these flower crafts:

Here’s another video guide, but this time to make giant flowers. I’d never seen the giant ones before, but these are seriously beautiful!

2. Stained Glass Tissue Paper Votive Holder

These Mother’s Day crafts are inexpensive items that are creative, personal and easy to make. You only need glass votive holders, tissue paper, glue and paintbrushes.

The easiest thing to do is tear the tissue paper into various shapes and layer them on the votive holder. While holding them in place, use the paint brush to paint the glue onto the glass holder and over the top of the tissue paper as you go. Don’t put the paper or the glue on the inside. Let the whole thing dry. Viola! Done.

If you’re feeling craftier, you may want to try this votive holder.

Or explore making these.

3. Origami Light Boxes

This final craft is very pretty when done correctly. You can either use white paper with white lights, white paper with colored lights or colored paper with white lights. All you need is paper, maybe a little bit of tape and strings of Christmas lights.

First, you need to make origami water balloons. These, like the paper flowers, will take some time to master but are well worth the effort.

Here’s a video detailing how to make them:

Then, using the opening that you blew into, place them over the lights.

You can end up with some really pretty strands of lights, and they work well with dangly icicle lights too!

Question: Do you know of any other great Mother’s Day crafts for teenagers? How could you use these crafts to make the mothers of your youth feel special? Let us know in the comments below.

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Writing about a Mother’s Day fundraiser in February – what’s the deal with that? A couple of reasons:

I’ve learned my lesson from the Valentine’s Day fundraiser that you shouldn’t wait until the day before to suggest the fundraiser as – unsurprisingly – it doesn’t give other youth workers much time to organize it
Mother’s Day is different depending on what country you live in. In 100 countries worldwide (yep, I just counted the number on Wikipedia) Mother’s Day is in May, but there are about 50 other countries that celebrate Mother’s Day at other times of the year

One of these other countries is the UK where I’m from originally, so I have to be more on the ball with this, as living in America means I don’t get any prompts until late April nowadays – a little late in the day for my Mum in the UK.

Anyways, the Mother’s Day fundraiser. Mother’s Day should be a special day for our Mums/Moms, so the Mother’s Day fundraiser gives youth an opportunity to both surprise and treat her. Do this be organizing a special afternoon tea for mothers that doubles as a fundraiser.

Afternoon Tea

The Mother’s Day fundraiser should be held on the Sunday afternoon of Mother’s Day and Moms should be served whatever constitutes fancy where you live. In the UK, this would probably be tea served on a proper china set if someone has one available to you, along with something like scones, jam and clotted cream. In the US………..good question. Being a guy from the UK, I’m not really best qualified to advise what’s fancy – please let me know in the comments below any thoughts you have!

To make this even more special, have your youth be the servers. Get them to dress up smartly and bring in someone to teach them some basic lessons of being a server. Moms will get a kick out of having their children serve them this way, especially seeing their son/daughter all dressed up.

Also consider having flowers on hand to be given to mothers. In the UK, daffodils are the traditional Mother’s Day flower, but I’m sure most Moms would appreciate any kind of flowers.

The Mother’s Day fundraiser doesn’t have to be restricted to mothers with children in your youth group – make it available to all mothers, grandmothers, etc, provided you have enough space to do so. So long as it doesn’t cost too much, produce some well designed invitations/tickets to be given to attendees.

Fundraising

To make this into a Mother’s Day fundraiser, sell tickets for mothers to be able to attend. This will be needed to cover the cost of the tea, food, flowers, etc, so price it appropriately so that your youth group raises money on top of that.

Encourage your youth to buy a ticket for their Mom as their gift to her for Mother’s Day (or get them to hit up the Bank of Dad). Put together some flyers or invitations to be handed out with details of when, where and how much the Mother’s Day fundraiser will be. Give these to your youth to hand out as widely as possible (so long as you can accommodate many people).

If your youth group is run through a church, a church service is an ideal opportunity to promote the Mother’s Day fundraiser and make sure as many people as possible know about it.

Be sensitive

Mother’s Day can be an emotional time of year for people whose Moms have died or left them, so be aware of this if any of the youth in your group are in this position. Don’t exclude them from the Mother’s Day fundraiser by any means, but be sensitive to their feelings and don’t pressure them into helping if they’re not keen.

I hope this has given you some good ideas for a Mother’s Day fundraiser – we have many other youth group fundraiser ideas, so check them out if you ever need any inspiration.

Question: What would you serve at a Mother’s Day fundraiser? Let us know in the comments below.