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!
FCA Worship Night
We were so excited to help at the FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) worship night at Pleasantville Christian Church. We were able to bring cookies donated by Subway as well as drinks to offer as refreshments following the service.
Originally the event was intended to be an outdoor service behind the library. When heavy rain threatened to cancel the event, Pleasantville Christian Church stepped up to open their doors to the teens who had organized the event.
It was a beautiful night of worship!
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! :)
5th & 6th Grade Pre-Game Party 2019
We had a BLAST on October 18th at our Pre-Game party for 5th and 5th graders!
We started things out with a few large group games. When a mountain of hotdogs that the Booster Club cooked up for us arrived we sent kids through the line for dinner. We served them hotdogs, chips, snack cakes, and their choice of caffeine free pop or water. The photo booth was set up for them to snap some photos, too!
For such a high energy group we knew we’d need some high energy games! We ordered dodge balls that are “regulation”, which apparently means they are supposed to throw better and sting less. They seemed to have a lot of fun playing! Kids were also welcome to choose not to play and just hang out with friends and chat. But most everyone played or laughed on the sidelines.
We had hoped to end the night with a super fun dance off, and the kids were amped for it! Our blue tooth speaker, which had been working just fine at the start of our night, malfunctioned and we had to finish with the basketball game knock-out instead. We were pretty bummed out about the music, we had some kids READY to dance! A better system and microphone are on our future shopping list. We need to be able to amplify our voices above such excited kids!
We also took a short moment to remind kids why we do what we do. We reminded them that we care about them, that they matter, and that God cares about them. God loves us lavishly, unconditionally, and asks us to love others the same way. Which is what we intend to do!
We want to the thank the Pleasantville Trojans Booster Club for helping us order the hotdogs and buns, and also for cooking them up for us. We were so thankful, and the kids loved devouring them. A huge thank you also to all of our volunteers and to those who donated money and pop to help with the event.
If you would like to donate to help us host more events for Pleasantville youth, click on the button below!
Middle School Dance Night 2019
On September 27th, 2019, 7th and 8th graders in Pleasantville danced the night away at the Memorial Hall. We had almost 80 youth attend this high energy event.
We supplied heaps of hostess snacks, every Mountain Dew flavor known to man, and of course water and bananas. We love the reaction we get when kids come to the snack table with their little velcro wallets or lanyard money clips. They shyly ask us how much an oatmeal cream pie and a Dr. Pepper is. When we happily tell them, “its free!”, they don’t believe us at first! Their eyes light up as they yell “Thank you!”. We just love that!
The feedback we received from the kids was overwhelmingly great. They loved the music selection. Cass went out of his way to find songs kids requested, even searching out the censored versions of certain requested songs to make sure the music we played was appropriate.
We had many opportunities to get to know the kids who attended. We made sure we told them how much we cared about them, and how much we believe they matter. We reminded them that God loves them, and cares for them too.
We also gave away a 1lb container of FLARP!, which for those who don’t know, is basically a fart noise maker and middle school kids lose their minds over it. Tommy Booth was the lucky winner!
We had a fantastic night and we are looking forward to getting to know these wonderful kids more and more!
Thank you to our volunteers: Eric Goodale, Chelsea Bender, Autumn Fennewald, Michael and Jennie Koenig, Mike and Emily Caulkins, and Chad and Stacy Rowson. Thank you to the City of Pleasantville for the use of the Memorial Hall. Thank you to Cass Lester for his DJ services. Thanks Pleasantville Schools for helping us spread the word.
Giant Angry Birds Game
What do water balloons, stacks of boxes, and 500ft sling shots get you? GIANT ANGRY BIRDS GAME! And we had FUN! The youth chose to split up in boys vs girls teams and battle it out by launching water balloons at each other’s box towers, trying to knock them down and pop huge water balloons hidden inside them. It was a ton of fun. Everyone got a bottle of water and an icecream bar in between games. When we were finished, everyone worked together to pick up every single water balloon piece in the grass. What an awesome group of kids!
And of course, it ended with a pretty epic water balloon fight!
Flag Football and More
On July 10, 2019 Pleasantville Youth Initiative hosted a flag football game/hangout at the park in town. Youth had a blast playing flag football and extreme paper rock scissors!
We ended the event by making sure these awesome kids knew how much we cared about them. We reminded that they mattered to us, and to God. We had a lot of laughs, and everyone wanted to stay longer!
500 May Baskets
To celebrate MAY DAY we came together to make over 500 May Baskets!
Youth and volunteers punched holes in paper cups and used pipe cleaners to make a handle. We added popcorn, M&Ms, and some suckers in assembly line fashion. Students wrote encouraging messages on each basket.
Early on May first we delivered these to every student in the entire elementary school! We also left a shiny new pencil for each student as well. The kids were so surprised to get a special May Day gift!
We hope kids at Pleasantville Elementary School felt loved and appreciated!