GEMS Sleep over and Ice Creame Social

Hello, it’s Christine here. 

This is something new for me – my first time ever blogging.

What better place to start than here on Ron’s site with his loyal band of followers!  I’m here to show everyone what an awesome time we had at a couple of GEMS events this year. 

I usually give an update on GEMS Sunday at church but Ron has taken over that service with his Peru update so in return, he is allowing me on his blog. How very nice of him.

For those of you who don’t know, GEMS stands for Girls Everywhere Meeting the Saviour and it is the girls program at Calvin CRC for girls in Gr.2-6.  Our regular evenings consist of working on various badges. Some of the badges earned this year were: 

Women of the Bible, 

Fitness,

Heaven, 

Candy-making (always a favourite),

Photography, and 

Scrap booking.  

We also had a theme night where the girls earn a theme badge. This year’s theme was Get Wisdom: Go Beyond the Gold!

We had a special visit from Sheila Dykstra one night (I think Ron put that on here before).  Some other special events were a dress-up night, our sleepover and the end of the year Ice Cream Social. We really wanted to build Kub Kars and race the boys but we just didn’t have the time or knowledge required for this year. (The boys think that we were scared to lose).  But stay tuned, next year’s planning has already begun.

GEMS Sleep Over!

What follows now are some photos of our sleepover and the Ice Cream Social.

This is the room before everyone arrived.  

And after.

The older girls decided to move into a room of their own. Good thing too as there were a few in here who tried to stay up all night. 

At least the other room was allowed to sleep.

We didn’t have just girls at this sleepover. No we were protected by many various stuffed animals!

Look this one has a human body!

This one was bigger than a toddler. 

I actually did feel safer near it.

The fun of being a leader in GEMS for me is having my own daughter there. She was the youngest girl this year. (And the cutest in my opinion but I may be a bit biased).

After the girls got set up and ran around a bit, they did a craft led by Wilma and Amy D. 

I’ll take this opportunity to thank them so much for doing our craft nights this year.  It really gives us counsellors a break and they come up with the greatest ideas. Here are some samples of the craft this time.

After craft we had a games time. We did some freeze-dancing and then Sardines throughout the church.

After this we watched a movie and the girls then went straight to sleep – yeah right.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyways so I decided to stay up the night and read a good book. 

I thought maybe I’d be able to fall asleep around 2 am or so but no, some girls took shifts in trying to stay up the whole night. They certainly were determined!  I’m just glad I didn’t have to be around those girls the next day. 

Sorry parents.  : ) 

We had an awesome group of counsellors this year: Cheryl, Jackie, Lena, Mouy and Leanne. Cheryl told me in planning that she doesn’t do sleepovers BUT that she would come and make us all breakfast. Well that turned out to be the best deal ever because I certainly was in no mood to cook in the morning.  

It was April 1^st though so some of our food looked a little strange, but it still tasted great.

Note the green tinge on the pancake.

Yay Cheryl!!!

Ice-Cream Social - Year Ender!

Now for a few photos of our Ice Cream Social. The girls our allowed to invite one or two special women in their lives along for this evening. I think we ended up with around 45 women and girls. It always lots of fun.

 Here we are playing a getting-to-know-you game involving our shoes.

See, a shoe.

Then some moms and daughters took turns playing a Newlywed-style game. 

After that it was time for ice cream and socializing!

Hey Ron, who are these two people?  : ) 

We ended the evening by giving the girls their badges and some gifts and saying goodbye to the Graduating girls in Grade 6.

These are the six girls who will be moving on from GEMS. We’ll miss you.

Group shot.  

We had a most helpful Dad just behind the photographer making us all laugh.

Thanks to everyone who helped make GEMS a great event this year. We really had a fun time together learning and playing. Thanks also to those who prayed for our program. We truly did feel that God has blessed our time this year.

Intergenerational Time at Calvin

Intergenerational Get-together:  Q & A Style

Way back in April, I think, I got our more mature group of Calvinite's to spend an evening with Calvin's youth group.  It was a great time of inter-generational sharing.  

As I've continued to mature and "evolve" in youth ministry, I'm continually convinced that the generations of a congregation should mix more often than they do, and ways need to be provided for those events to occur.  

This evening consisted of placing several Congregational members at different tables, and then getting our young people to sit with them.  I provided a list of get to know you questions first, and then some more serious questions ranging like:

If you are married, how did you meet?

What has been a tough time in your life so far?

How have you seen God blessing you?

What was worship like when you were a young person?  

etc.  

It made for some great conversation, and before we knew it, it was time to go.  Below are some pictures of our time together, and comments from some of our mature members, and youth group members.  

After those comes another inter-generational event we held about a week later.. ... enjoy!  

 The group is gathered and getting to know each other.  

Comment from congregational Member:   What surprised me was that some of the kids were still talking about a literal 7 day creation.  At the same time, there was considerable interest in dinosaurs which seem to kind of contradict the traditional 7 day creation belief.  

There was some discussion of the Vietnam war and acceptability of war in general.  I think it would be good to have such a discussion.  Most, if not all the kids at my table have some post WWII Dutch immigration ancestry.  In my view, there seemed to be little appreciation for the fact that the sole reason these young people are here in Canada was because the Allies defeated the Axis powers and that it was as a result of the war that our parents, grandparents, great grandparents were able to immigrate.  

Comment from a Young Person:  When I first heard that we were spending time with the older portion of our congregation, I thought it would be fun to see people that I know and have the opportunity to get to know them better.  Because my small group leader was not there on this night I volunteered to lead our table in a series of questions and I must say, I was a lot of fun.  


The three older ladies at my table were willing to share and had an infinite amount of stories to share with the young people.  We also gained an idea of what church and childhood was like for them.  It seemed a lot different without the large amounts of technology around them which is completely different to what we are used to today.  It is interesting to learn about the sides of people that you would not normally hear about in everyday life.  I had a really enjoyable evening with our seniors and always love to spend time with them and learn from and about their experiences.

 A comment from a Congregational Member:  Last night was very good Ron, we were surprised by the amount of young people present. Both my wife and I enjoyed ourselves. We hope that we could give some encouragement to the young people. Thanks for inviting us.

Comment from Young Person:  It was neat to speak with them. I realize it is something we do not often take enough time to do; the interactions between the different age groups of the church.

It made me wonder if maybe one day I would be in their place talking about how things have changed from our generation to the next.  I guess it's really perspective giving.

We talked a lot about the church, and how it has changed. How worship has changed as well as sermons. We also talked about the differences of the churches present in our group. We also found ourselves talking about worship in Peru and how we can learn from them; something that distinctly stood out for me this time in Peru.

I learned about the different changes that the church went through since they've been going to church. I learned more about the people who we talked to and their lives as Christian and how life was different for them growing up.

At the end of the evening I had us sing a couple of songs out of the Hymn book.  Interestingly, some of the more mature folk wondered why I was doing that.  I did it because we don't often sing out of our hymn book in church, and there are many good songs of faith contained within it.  Yes, our newer contemporary songs are good, and I like them, but there are some good hymns that can keep us grounded as well, and I thought it good to let our young people sing a few........ 

As you can see from their faces, some of the group didn't know the songs to sing....so this is good exposure for the group.  : )   

A more panoramic view of the group together in the fellowship hall.......and now on to.........

Inter-generational Get-together: Part 2 - Games and Food

A few days later we decided to host a more informal time of getting to know each other intergenerationally.  We held a time after our morning service for food and fellowship through some games.  

We gathered together around the round tables and introduced ourselves.  

Then it was time for soup, chili and buns.  Another great time of food and fellowship.  

After lunch it was time to hunker down and play some games.  Rummy Kub started out here.  

Simon and Ryan and Megan get ready to begin a game brought by Martin...I forget the name.  

This table really got into their game.  There was no talking at all for a long time.  I didn't dare disturb them. : ) 

The room was full of hustle and bustle. 

This game was interesting.  It took the longest and seemed the most competitive, but everyone had a blast. 

Nice slate of numbers Chris.  

Mel and I cleaned up the dishes while everyone else enjoyed the games.  

Kevin's chili all went.  It was really good.  

At the end of our game time, sure enough, this was the last game going and the final counting of the scores was intense.  


Another fun afternoon had by all, and a time for the different generations to mix once again.    Hopefully we'll do it again next year.