Heroes – a holiday club or activity day using Launchpad

Lucy Moore

A two hour fun session for children using Launchpad

On your marks:
Launchpad is a superb resource for anyone wanting a series of child-friendly services. It can also be used as a basis for holiday clubs or one-off fun days. Here we take the five Launchpad sessions on heroes ) and give the basic ideas for adapting them for use at a two hour holiday club session

Get set:
You’ll need a copy of Launchpad available from this website at a promotional price of only £7.99 (reduced from £15.99) when you quote ‘Getting Going Offer’ on your order. (Offer available while stocks last)

You’ll also need craft books or ideas. The Bible Make and Do series has many lovely ideas or you can download them from the Web.

In this session, there will be times when the whole group comes together, and times when they divide off into smaller groups with their own leaders. Try to keep these small so that everyone feels they have the opportunity to speak if they want to, and so that relationships can be formed and names learned quickly. Between five and eight works well. This is also a good number for the leaders who aren’t confident about working with large groups of children.

The Launchpad Heroes series gives you plenty of good quality drama, songs to sing, ways of praying and talk material that you can build into a holiday club session. Here is an outline of the structure of such a session. You can then build the material into this as suits your particular children and situation.

Go!
1 Have an activity as children arrive and register, such as designing name badges in the shape of the Launchpad logo or something that matches the theme of each individual hero.

• Joshua – secret agent badge
• Samuel - ear
• Esther – perfume bottle
• Jonah - fish
• John – water / river shape

2 Bring the children altogether, welcome everyone and set out any rules for the day.

3 Worship songs from the selection in each session outline

4 Drama

5 Either follow up the drama with a talk altogether or divide into small groups and talk about the story using the talk outline guidelines in each session.

6 Still in small groups, do craft activities related to the theme. You will need to find these for yourself. Try the Bible Make and Do series, searching on the web, or looking at suggestions in other parts of the Barnabas website on these same heroes.

Here are some starters:

• Joshua – fondant icing bunches of grapes
• Samuel – models of the temple at Shiloh
• Esther – face painting / hand painting
• Jonah – make a big fish puppet
• John – drinking bottle decoration

7 Juice and toilet break sometime in here

8 Come back together into one large group, do some vigorous aerobic exercises, play a lively team game or sing some worship action songs to get the children active again.

9 Staying together but working in groups, have a fun memory verse activity.

10 Pray in a creative way with the children relating the prayer to the theme. For example:

• Joshua – devise a series of actions to go with the prayer ‘St Patrick’s breastplate’ and pray it together.
• Samuel – pray using a refrain ‘Speak Lord, your servant is listening.’
• Esther – rub perfumed massage oil into each others’ hands as some quiet meditative music plays
• Jonah – place frowning and smiley faces at the foot of the cross as a symbolic act of giving all our good and bad behaviour to Jesus.
• John – pour water over hands and ask for a new start.

11 Say good bye, advertise any activities and make sure the children are collected from their group leaders safely with all their crafts.