Post Game Party 2023
WOW. What a night! We had 120 middle and high school youth attend our 2023 Post Game Party! We had a BLAST. At this event we have music to dance to, but we also throw in some games. Everyone was COLD and TIRED after the football game, but we had a good time anyway!
Pool Party in Carlisle 2023
We had a BLAST swimming at the Carlisle pool! Middle School and High School students were invited for a free night of swimming. Everyone had a great time!
Knoxville Rec Center Night
We had another great time at the Knoxville Rec Center on March 4, 2023! We love renting the rec center and inviting Pleasantville’s teens over to swim and play basketball. They love to socialize and get out of the house on cold nights! It’s always a hit!
The PvilleYI Very Merry Chick-Fil-A Christmas Dinner
On December 20th, 2022, PvilleYI hosted the Very Merry Chick-Fil-A Christmas Dinner! Middle and High School students were invited to attend. The event was held at Fairview Christian Church and catered by Chick-Fil-A. Teens were welcomed with festive tables and a small stocking filled with candy and fun items. Marcy Pettyjohn sewed each little stocking and donated them. The teens loved them!
It was a very fun night and everyone left with full tummies and a lot of great memories.
Rec Center Night
We had a great night at the Knoxville Rec Center! Teens were able to play basketball and swim. They had a great time! We provided snacks, of course!
Post Game Party 2022
We were so excited to have 120 students attend our 2022 Post Game Party! That is our highest event attendance to date. This event was, as always, FREE.
This event was for Middle School and High School students and took place after the PHS home football game. Students were greeted warmly (quite literally, it was COLD!) and welcomed into the Memorial Hall. Tons of snacks and pop were waiting for them, as well as tables to hang out at and a dance floor booming with music thanks to Cass Lester with Central Iowa DJ.
We had such a great time!
Cookie Making Class
On February 15th, 2022, we had a cookie making class for a small group of middle school and high school students. PvilleYI co-founder Emily Caulkins taught the teens the basics of making large batches of sugar cookies. She showed them how to carefully measure ingredients (yes, you really do need to make sure that was 2 cups and not 3), how to mix the ingredients properly, how to roll the dough just right, and how to use cookie cutters and bake the cookies. The teens also made delicious frosting.
This class was for the teens to learn baking skills, but it was also an opportunity for them to give back to the community. These cookies and frosting were going to be used by our Pleasantville Girl Scout troop to use for their cookie decorating class, which Emily taught as well.
We served these helpful bakers some pizza while we waited for cookies to bake. During this time we were able to talk and learn about each other, see the teens incredible art in their sketchbooks, and laugh together.
It was a fantastic time. Thank you to Pleasantville’s St. Paul’s United Methodist Church for allowing us to use their Family Life Center and kitchen for this event!
Christmas Party Drop-In at Smokey Row
On December 23rd, 2021, we set up at Smokey Row for a couple of hours so teens could stop in and get a treat and a gift from us! We had cookies, hot chocolate, and of course a gift bag full of fun small gifts for each teen who dropped in. It was a lot of fun! HUGE thank you to Smokey Row for donating Hot Chocolate and allowing us to use their awesome facility! WE LOVE SMOKEY ROW!
Knoxville Rec Center Night Nov. 2021
On November 20th, 2021, PvilleYI rented the Knoxville Rec Center for a night of swimming and basketball for middle school and high school students. It was a TON of fun packed into two hours. Snacks were provided and a fun time was had by all! We hope to make this a regular event for students. They really enjoyed spending time together in a safe environment. Thanks Knoxville Rec Center!
Post Game Party 2021
Well that was fun! We had a BLAST at our 2021 Post Game Party!
We welcomed over 100 teens at our after game event.
Students had a blast dancing, eating snacks, and hanging out with their friends!
Thanks to Pleasantville Schools for letting us have our event in the PHS cafeteria! We are your BIGGEST fans!
Also thanks to Cass Lester at Central Iowa DJ for keeping the teens happy with tons of awesome music!
Water Balloon Event 2021
Ever played the game “Angry Birds”? We created two huge box towers and let teens attempt to knock them down with water balloon launchers! Of course it always ends with a big water ballon war, because, why not?
We also had fun with the giant beach ball!
Thanks to Celebrate Church, Knoxville for allowing us to borrow your 9-Square sets. The kids always love them!
Competition For Kids Who Like Games 2021
It was SO great to actually get to have an IN PERSON event again! Covid has been hard for all of us. Thankfully we were able to have this outdoor event and have some fun!
Teens were split into teams and given a team color with matching bandana. Each team came up with a funny name, and team identity!
Teams competed in a bunch of games curated to match the different levels of interest of teens. From Basketball to Dodgeball to Improv and Trivia, there was a little something for everyone!
We had a GREAT time!
Thanks so much to all our volunteers! And thank you to Celebrate Church, Knoxville for lending us your 9-Square sets!
Creativity Challenge Winners
We are so IMPRESSED by all of the creative teens in our community. Our theme for this challenge was: HOPE: finding light in the darkness during 2020 and 2021. We were blown away by the beauty that these teens were able to capture and share with the world.
JUDGES
Our judges had a difficult job choosing a winner in each category. They took the time to look over every entry and provide encouraging feedback for each participant. (Feedback to every teen will be emailed out to them within a few days of this announcement). It was very important to our PvilleYI leadership team that judges came from outside of our team and board, since several of our team and volunteers have teens who wanted to participate.
THANK YOU to these wonderful people for being our Judges!
Anna Belzer
Carol Beier
Amy Core
Cass Lester
WINNERS
Here are the winners for our Spring 2021 Creativity Challenge! Each will receive a $100 cash prize. We will be in touch to get those prizes to you, winners!
Visual Art: SARAH MANN
Writing: ADONIAH KOENIG
The Girl With Her Hood UP
-Addie Koenig
Photography: JONAH SCHUMACHER
Music: ELIZABETH GOODALE
Dance: TARYN BRENT
Each of our participants will receive encouraging feedback from our judges, as well as being featured on our website! To see all of our entries, check out our Creativity Gallery!
Congrats to all our winners, and all participants! KEEP CREATING! We are SO proud of each and every teen!
May Day 2020: Over 600 May Baskets!
On May 1st, 2020, we handed out and delivered 600 May Baskets to our community! Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we adjusted our plans to be extra careful.
Volunteers put together and filled the baskets with candy and some flower seeds to plant!
We met at Shadle Park in Pleasantville and began a drive-thru May Day Basket pick up. Of course we dressed up in fun costumes and had music playing! Everyone needed a boost of HAPPY after so much time in quarantine.
After our drive-thru time ended, we left the baskets we had left at random homes around Pleasantville.
We had so much fun bringing back this fantastic tradition!
Christmas Party 2019
Hot Chocolate, popcorn, music, and gifts? What more could a kid ask for! On December 14th, 2019 we hosted our first ever Christmas party for 7th-12th graders. It was a blast!
This event was different than events we have done in the past. Rather than just being a hang out night, this event brought the kids center-stage for a series of fun activities including a Christmas Tree making contest, a lip sync battle, and a Christmas Q&A.
The highlight of the night for PvilleYI volunteers was handing out a gift to every kid. Everyone got the same thing: a brown box containing gummy bears, takis (chips), a PvilleYI bracelet, a PvilleYI decal sticker that says “Every Person Matters”, a few pieces of candy, a candy cane, a pack of gum, and a really cozy pair of LazyOne Christmas Socks! Every gift was wrapped and a bow was placed on top. Why go to all the trouble to wrap all these presents? Because unwrapping gifts is SO much fun!
Ultimately our goal behind giving each kid a gift is simple: They matter to us. And when people matter to you, you go the extra mile and show them that you care in tangible ways. God gives to us in such a lavish way. We didn’t really need the color purple, but He gave it to us anyway. We didn’t really need a singing bird outside our window, but He gave it to us anyway. These kids might not need these gifts in the same way that they need their survival needs met. But we gave them to them anyway. Because good gifts make life special, worth enjoying, just like a C chord or a chocolate chip cookie. It’s a small way to bring joy. And small things add up.
The youth surprised us all by counting to three and in a unified voice expressing thanks.
On Christmas God gave us the most beautiful gift of all: His Son, Jesus, the Prince of Peace. And we want to love the way He does!
Merry Christmas!
CFKWLG 2019 Was a Blast!
On November 23rd we hosted our second “Competition for Kids Who Like Games (and also for kids who do not like games)", or CFKWLG.
Competing can be a lot of fun. Some kids are naturally tuned to enjoy athletics, while others are not. And that is OK! Take our co-founders for example. Emily loves an intense game of dodgeball or basketball. Jennie, however, prefers trivia and creative challenges. Both enjoy competing, but not in the same way.
We created this event to appeal to both of these personality types. Learning to enjoy winning and losing, understanding that playing by the rules makes a victory sweeter, and working together with others toward a common goal are all important skills kids will need as adults. At this age, kids still learn a lot through play.
We wanted kids to understand that in life they won’t be on a team full of people who are exactly like them. At work, and even in their families, they’ll have to learn how to let someone else on their team shine so they can all find success. One minute a team is cheering their teammate who won them the dodgeball game, and the next they’re cheering the teammate who earned them 3 points in trivia. Everyone contributes.
As youth arrived and signed in they were divided into four different teams at random, each team assigned a different color: Red, Green, Yellow, and Blue.
Teams each had two volunteers as coaches. Together they came up with their team names and their team battlecries. We encouraged them to be as creative and silly as they wanted to be!
The teams chose the following names:
Yellow Team: The Millertary (named after Colton Miller)
Red Team: The Rojo Toros
Blue Team: The Blue Ice Giraffes
Green Team: The Turtle Strips
The teams competed in a series of games. We choose games that athletes and non-athletes alike can find a way to enjoy including some trivia, a dance-off, and dodgeball. By including games that appeal to different types of personalities, we were able to give each kid on the team a chance to contribute to the points their team earned.
Note: We used “regulation” dodgeballs (because apparently that’s a thing). They are supposed to sting less when a player is hit with them and be more fun to use.
The winner of the CFKWLG traveling trophy this year was the Blue Ice Giraffes!
Kids ended the evening with some candy bars and time to hang out together.
Events like this encourage teamwork and friendship. Competition can be a lot of fun when you play fair and laugh with your opponents. We hope the kids learned a little bit about teamwork, too.
We had a great time! A huge thank you to all of our volunteers: Stacy Rowson, Kirsten Furnal, Greg Eichenburg, Clinton Wallace, Eric Goodale, Mike & Emily Caulkins, and Jennie & Michael Koenig. You can watch the highlight video below:
Post Game Party 2019
What an awesome night with a bunch of great kids! We invited 7th-12th graders to a post game party on October 25th, 2019. After the football game youth began flooding into the High School Cafeteria. When they arrived they signed in with our volunteers and headed in for snacks, drinks, and dancing!
One thing is for sure: there was a lot of laughing at this event. One of the highlights for us occurred during the song “Don’t Stop Believin’”. Completely on their own, the entire group circled up to sing the song. Then they came together in the center for the chorus. It was encouraging to see all of them in sync for a moment. Clicks faded, divisions fell away, and they were just one big circle.
We love doing events like these because we see so many smiles. Life won’t always be easy or fun for these kids. But it is our hope that we can offer some enjoyment, some laughter, some fun that will help outweigh the bad days. God loves us so much and freely gives us good things. He asks us to love others the same way. So what we love to give them is a few hours of happiness. For a little while they are just kids having fun, wearing funny hats in front of a camera, and singing at the top of their lungs. Loved dearly by God, by us, and by their community.
We want to thank all our volunteers for this event. We couldn’t do it without you! Thank you also to PHS for allowing us to use the school facility. Thanks to Autumn Fennewald at Sweet Serendipity Photography for taking photos at the photo booth. She has a great eye! Thank you to Cass Lester for DJing for us again. He knows how to get the crowd moving! And a shout out to the Booster Club for bringing over a pile of delicious pork sandwiches, the kids were thrilled and so were the volunteers!
Although this was a 7th-12th grade event, we had very few high school students attend. We sort of expected that, but we wanted to try one more time to keep it open. We are taking notes about these things and plan to make some changes to future events, separating the age groups and finding unique ways to bless the high school students in Pleasantville as much as we are blessing the Middle Schoolers.
You can see a highlight video below!
If you would like to donate to help us throw more fun events like these, you can learn how here!
And just for fun, here’s the prep video from Emily and Jennie as well! :)