May is Mental Health Awareness Month! Reduce stigma and increase empathy around mental health with these three ideas.
Three Ways to Reduce Stigma Around Mental Health
Ideas for Arab American Heritage Month
Ideas you can use to celebrate Arab American Heritage Month in April
Winter Olympics Activities Throughout the Club
Integrate the 2022 Winter Olympics into your programming with these fun high-yield activity ideas!
Ideas to Celebrate the Lunar New Year
Ideas for crafts, games, books, and more to help you celebrate the Lunar New Year in your afterschool programming.
Everything You Need to Start a Book Club With Youth
Book clubs afterschool are a great way for youth to build relationships with others and practice skills like critical thinking and reading fluency. Learn how to get started plus get picks for Hispanic & Latino Heritage Month.
How a Little Free Library Can Promote Literacy
Read how one Club is putting books in their community's hands and how you can start a Little Free Library through your afterschool program.
Juneteenth: Ideas for Celebrating Black Liberation, Culture, Connection, and Joy!
As Juneteenth is becoming more widely known, get ideas for learning more and sparking creativity with youth.
More Ideas for Celebrating Asian American & Pacific Islander Month
May is Asian American & Pacific Islander Month! Use this list of activities and resources for building empathy to celebrate with youth.
Ideas for Black History Month
Ideas you can use around the Club for Black History Month
It’s Election Season! Ideas for Teens, Youth, and More
The 2020 Election is inescapable, which means that it is also looming large in the lives of youth. Elections are a great opportunity to introduce young people to one of the most important and powerful rights we have as Americans, the right to vote. https://giphy.com/gifs/GoVote-vota-go-vote-l0MYP0xoNtuPTilhe It can be hard to navigate these discussions when the... Continue Reading →
Pi Day Throughout the Club
Lesa Sexton is BACK with a ONE-TWO PUNCH of academic ideas! Today, we are having fun with math! It’s a common refrain heard from kids and adults alike: “I’m bad at math. I’m just not a math person.” Math doesn’t always get a lot of love, and we totally get it. It can seem daunting... Continue Reading →
3 Ways to Celebrate Read Across America
Lesa Sexton, member of BGCA's Education team, took a break from getting Summer Brain Gain ready to write today's post. Wanna know how to travel the world for free, get intimate access to world leaders, entertainers, athletes, and visionaries, discover magical worlds full of imaginary creatures, and go on daring adventures-all from the comfort of... Continue Reading →
How to Find Books for Multicultural Children’s Book Day
On the ClubX Blog, we love inclusion, diversity, reading, and celebrations. All of these come together in Multicultural Children's Book Day! To help you bring it to your youth, I'm serving bulleted list realness. First observed in 2012, the mission of Multicultural Children's Book Day is to raise awareness for Children's Literature that celebrate diversity,... Continue Reading →
Spooky Scary Halloween Ideas
It's September, which means IT'S TIME TO START PLANNING FOR HALLOWEEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Halloween is the best holiday to celebrate with young people. You can go all out and be silly and ridiculous and it is just accepted. I love it! To put together this post, I asked the foremost experts on fun- Boys & Girls Club... Continue Reading →
20 Ideas to Make Your Club Storage Instaworthy
So I'll confess. I still haven't watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix or read her book or even thought too much about her because I know I'll want to organize everything in my life and it is OVERWHELMING and I DO NOT HAVE TIME. I'll get to it eventually. Maybe. But having a... Continue Reading →
No Passport? No Problem! It’s Summer Reading!
Our very own resident librarian and newest member of the Youth Trends team, Shannon Lake, is here to deliver the BEST tips to encourage summer reading including a free download from the BGCA's Power Hour Resource Guide! Summer is almost here and it’s time for you and your members to take a trip! No passport,... Continue Reading →
It’s Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month!
Did you know that it’s Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month? Get ready for a culturally rich ride in our two-part blog series! First up, we will explore the history behind the celebration of Asian/Pacific American Heritage month, how Clubs can incorporate recognition of the month into their Club day, and we will hear from one of... Continue Reading →
Financial Literacy and Comic Books – An Unlikely Duo
We are excited to have Rachel Smith, official Money Matters Guru here at BGCA, here on the ClubX Blog for the first time! Read on for a fun activity you can adapt for all ages for Financial Literacy Month! Money! That word can cause emotions of joy, excitement, or even worry. Here at BGCA we... Continue Reading →
16 Books and Movies Featuring Women in STEM – With Discussion Questions!
We are celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on the ClubX Blog! Be sure to read Part 1 of this series for information on the BGCA STEM Challenge. Get those prizes! STEM can be intimidating for adults, let alone young girls. But when it’s presented in an approachable way, it’s much... Continue Reading →
It’s Braille Literacy Month! Tips for Making Your Club an Inclusive Space and Three Activities for Introducing Braille to Sighted Youth
Welcome to 2019! Here on the ClubX Blog we LOVE holidays and awareness weeks and months. They are an easy way to ignite ideas for activities and special events, and help to keep things fresh. Special holidays are also good opportunities to highlight wonderful differences and bring diversity into programming. January is Braille Literacy Month,... Continue Reading →
5 Tips for Encouraging Boys to Read
I recently came across this article about the fact that in just about every developed country, girls are reading more than boys. Some key points: Boys dedicate less than than girls to processing words, are more prone to skipping passages or entire sections, and frequently choose books beneath their reading levels. Girls are more likely to... Continue Reading →
It’s World Kindness Day! Link Roundup
November 13 is World Kindness Day! Kindness is one of the character traits that we all hope to cultivate in the youth we serve. But how do we teach kindness? Today on the ClubX Blog we've got a roundup of some of the best ideas for activity plans from around the web. This video is... Continue Reading →
October is National Fantasy Month! Ideas For All Month Long
At my Club and in my former life as a classroom teacher, I was always looking for fun themes to help spark my creative flow. Once I had a theme in mind, I worked to adapt games or activities we were already going to do, or had done before, to the theme to keep things... Continue Reading →
Activity Idea: Simple Strategy Game PLUS Sample Program Schedule
I'm always looking for new activities and games to play with youth, and especially for ones that will make them stretch their logical thinking muscles and expose them to new ideas or cultures. Today's find from Multicultural Kids Blogs does ALL of those! Pong Hau K'i is a simple board game from China, and can... Continue Reading →
It’s Native American Heritage Month! Plus Read-Alouds
Here on the Club Experience Blog we are thrilled to join with BGCA and our Native Services Unit to celebrate Native American Heritage Month during November. The amazing work that the Native Services team and our Clubs that serve Native Youth do has been one of my favorite parts of the Movement to learn about.... Continue Reading →
12 Read-Aloud Books for Teaching Growth Mindset
Do you read books aloud in your Club? The benefits of read-alouds are well-documented, even for older youth. And beyond these reasons, they can be used as a great activity-starter for any area of your Club. In the education room or learning center, you could have youth write another story on the theme of the... Continue Reading →
