January 10th - We Start Up Again

Reminder to all that we have moved the schedule ahead one week this month because of the school holidays, vacation, etc.

We will see the girls on January 10th.

Hope everyone had a great holiday season!

It's Time for Some Healthy Snacks

Jen Brennen will lead us through a series of recipes and the preparation of a variety of healthy snacks. I can't let the secret out of the bag yet. We'll wait for the girls to share.

All About Me Boxes

The girls have been asked to bring pictures, magazines, photos and anything else that represents their interests and passions.

Come Prepared to Play Outside

We're playing games in the park tonight, as requested by our Tweens, and doing a few Halloween crafts, also requested by the gals.

Getting To Know Each Other

We had a great evening of games and getting to know each other this past week. We played name games, move your butt (just for the fun of it), made posters about ourselves, and the girls made some recommendations for future activities. It looks like we had a few keys activities already planned that the girls wanted on the schedule including cooking, a party, games in the park and dance.

Our older group is smaller than usual this year so we are combining the groups and moving meetings to the first and third Tuesday of Oct, Nov, Jan, Feb, April and May. The schedule is outlined on the right of this site.

It looks like we have a great group. They were enthusiastic, involved and having fun last week.

Andrea, Kayla and I are looking forward to the coming year of Tween Club activities.

Welcome to Andrea!

This year's tween club instructor is Andrea Dark, both an headgaurd and swim instructor at Dovercourt. She is a third year political science and religion student at Carleton University. Andrea has always been involved in her community, whether it has been through being class president at her highschool, to helping organize her local relay for life, completing an internship on parliament hill or facilitating English Conversation Groups at Carleton. Andrea loves being active, meeting new people and having a positive influence on others! She looks forward to meeting all of you and sharing incredible memories with you over the next few months!

Getting Ready for This Year

It's been a busy summer and we are finally getting Tween Club ready for the upcoming year. More news on our leaders and our activities coming shortly. If the girls have any ideas or thoughts on what they would like to do this year, please leave them in the comments section of this blog post.

The Tween Bake Sale

The weather was dull and grey and I have to say it was cold sitting out there for 3 hours. A hot cup of tea and regular breaks inside helped to keep us warm.

Thanks to all your baked goods and a few boxes of books from our house, we were able to raise $330 (which included a $100 donation from one family) for Harmony House.

It's unfortunate the weather wasn't on our side. I think next year we need to try the first weekend in June. We've never been very lucky with the last weekend in May. Time to switch things up next year.

Thanks again for your support and assistance. We will be in touch soon.

Bizarre Bazaar - CANCELLED - But Bake Sale On!

We have canceled the Bizarre Bazaar due to weather. We can't set up the activities in the rain which changes the plan all together. We are scaling back the event to just a bake sale and me and my daughters can take care of manning the table.

If you have done your baking, please bring it by and we will gladly sell it to the Dovercourt swim lesson gang. The proceeds of the Bake Sale will got to Harmony House, our charity of choice this year. Feel free to drive up and we will grab your sweet treats from the window of you car. We will be set up under the awning on the parking lot side.

We will be in touch with a message for the girls next week and more news on next years program. I'm so sorry that the Bizarre Bazaar did not come together this year.

February Fun

We started off the month with separate sessions on emotions and a look into the mirror. Our mirrors allowed us to look at our natural beauty.

Just this week we enjoyed a beautiful evening of skating at the McKellar Park rink. We played tag and follow the leader and enjoyed a night together on the ice.

Jen Charbonneau Joins us Jan 25th

We will have a guest speaker, Jen Charbonneau at the end of the month. Jen joined us a few years ago and we thought it was time to have her back for an encore. Jen will lead a session that will focus on the tough emotion of stress. At our first session the girls talked about the stress of school, dealing with yelling parents, getting out the door in the morning, and other day to day stresses they have experienced.

Jen will help them identify the emotion of stress, provide some words to better communicate it, look at coping mechanisms and more. She will do a craft with the girls, a relaxation visualization (she will have CD's to purchase if your girls are interested) and she even has a small gift for them.

Looking forward to the session at the end of January.

Happy, Confused, Excited and Sad

These are just a few of the emotions we felt during our individual sessions this month. The younger girls looked at different emotions and described when they felt them, how their bodies reacted during these emotions and who they confide in to deal with emotions. We played games, drew strength from each other and our individualism and the rocks that Anne gave us will help remind us of the strength we draw from both.

The older girls put their emotions into motion by putting together artistic representations of their emotions. One group used a musical approach to tell the story of feeling an array of emotions, another put on a play with a narrator and background sounds and the last wrote a song and included guitar playing from one of the girls. At the end of the session, the girls shared their emotions. Most were happy and content and a few were excited and tired.

We are but a spectrum of emotions. We are emotional beings after all.