First Month Completed - Center Hill, PA
We are finishing our first month of Awana tonight. Our training and organization went very well. We have 16 helpers every Wednesday night. Our first week we had 14 kids and the second week they all came back. Our third week we had a BARF night (Bring A Real Friend) night. We had 20 kids show up that night and we had 22 last week. God is certainly at work. We are dealing with size issues with our building being smaller. But God is giving wisdom. We have theme nights scheduled for every club night. We visited a club about 35 miles away that was very helpful. We also found other church websites who have Awana a big help.
http://www.gbce.net/Library/Brochures/AWANA%20Brochure.pdf - This website has an excellent explanation of Awana on the one panel. I used a lot of this information for our brochure. I put a pre-registration form on one of the panels.
http://mapleridgebiblechurch.org/Cubbies%20Brochure.pdf - This was another option to do a brochure. This actually helped in planning areas of club.
http://kenoshabible.org/awana/parent_letter.htm - This was an excellent welcome letter that I used to give to parents after their child attended Awana. Of course, I tailored it to suit our church.
As far as theme nights, I took several ideas from the calendar we received as an example at Discover Awana. I also looked through our lesson book (Why Should I Believe the Bible is True?) and developed some themes from the lessons so they corresponded. Having grown up in Awana, I also remembered some of my personal favorites! There are also some good ideas on the Awana website in the Commanders Corner forum. Awana Theme Nights
Todd and Angela Shoemaker
November 5th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Sounds like your club is off to a great start! A BARF night–was that an AWANA idea?
A couple of things–I notice that your name was not included in the blog–so we don’t know what church you are from. Could you edit your blog entry to include your name and church?
Also, could you insert a hyperlink to the helpful church Awana sites? That way other folks could use them as resources.
A great start!
Brian Wechsler Executive Director Village Missions
November 7th, 2007 at 9:53 am
A “BARF night”, how cool is that?! You guys are great! I’m so glad to hear that things are starting out well.
Eric
January 9th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Hello, glad to hear your club is going well. We are currently in our 6th year though our site is not so old. However, I do try to keep the next few theme nights up to date. Working on our about page and the rest of our club pages. Check us out at http://awana.anzabaptistkids.org or visit the church site at http://www.anzabaptistchurch.org and click the Awana link.
God bless!
-Mr. Josh
Sparks Director Anza Valley Awana Clubs of Anza Baptist Church
Teacher-Elementary Anza Valley Christian School (http://www.anzavalleycs.org)
January 9th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Sorry, one more thing. We are a small church too! If you want some tips, let me know. We started with 20 total and now average near 100 each night….that’s more than half of the church registered members!