Babysitting Clinic

Well tonight was a completely last minute thrown together activity that turned out really great! We had planned to go to a local cornmaze, but bad weather made that a no go. Instead of doing something simple and uncomplicated, I decided to go the difficult route and throw together a babysitting clinic. My beehives are right at that age where they are starting to get a lot of babysitting jobs, and I thought they could definitely use some training! :)

The first thing I did was to get one of my favorite people in our ward to come talk to our girls. She is a labor and delivery nurse, and she taught the girls all about infant and toddler CPR and what to do in several different emergency situations. She was so thorough with the information, but really entertaining at the same time.

Then we had the girls put together a babysitting kit they could take along with them when they go on different jobs. My president found some awesome resources on the Red Cross website, they have amazing info for babysitters and parents. We are fortunate to have a brother in our ward that works for the Church and is able to get an amazing deal on printing church-related materials. I was able to email a bunch of different documents to him and he was able to get them printed off and to me today before our activity. We had some binders in our closet so we had the girls fill them with a list of Top Ten Babysitting Tips, Parent Information Sheet (for the parents to fill out) and a 26 page Activity Booklet from the Red Cross. Then they put the binders, crayons, coloring pages (printed for free off the internet), water paints, paint brushes, and stickers in these cute purple plastic totes I found at Hobby Lobby for 1.99.

We closed by encouraging the girls to add to these kits frequently, and really work to make their babysitting experiences great for everyone involved. This activity turned out really well, and if I would have had more time it could have been more fun and creative too. Again, if you have any interest in any kind of babysitting training for your girls, the Red Cross is a fantastic resource!!

Here is the link for all of the documents we used tonight:
http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.53fabf6cc033f17a2b1ecfbf43181aa0/?vgnextoid=5ced914124dbe110VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD&vgnextchannel=bf970c45f663b110VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD

New Beginnings...It's a Jungle Out There!

I decided to post just a few picture of what we did for our New Beginnings activity a year and a half ago. This one was quite a bit of work beforehand, but the effect when the girls and their parents walked in was totally worth it!




The part of the night the girls performed was a skit called "The Adventures of the Missing Personal Progress Book" I thought it was so clever. We brought in our 2nd Counselors entire bedroom set (she happened to have a jungle theme going on :) and had the girls looking in this messy room for their personal progress books. Because if your YW are like ours, they seem to have a hard time keeping track of that thing :) As they are looking they would find different items, like scriptures, picture of a boy, immodest shirt, etc and talk about how the For the Strength of Youth says you should handle those things. The girls did a great job and learned a lot too!




We also had some speakers and introduced the new Beehives, then ended the night with banana splits and banana chocolate cupcakes. It was a great night, and the girls STILL talk about it! Oh, and these were also the cute invites I made, I attached a baggie filled with animal cookies, fun fun! :)