Program: Adventure Club

For our March edition of Adventure Club, we ventured a little out there - our coworkers were a bit worried about what we wanted to do. What was this crazy (but highly appealing to kids) idea? Grossology, of course! Here's what we did!

When the kids came in, we split them into two groups: team snot and team poop. We started the program off with some trivia. We decided to run the trivia in a manner with which we've had success in the past - each team is given a stack of cards with all the answers printed on them, so teams must search through their cards to find the correct answer to each question and bring it up to the questioner (my coworker in this case). There is always a no-running rule (difficult though it can be to enforce) and this gives everybody pretty much an equal shot at getting each question right, especially with trivia like this where we didn't expect them to know the answers beforehand. All trivia was based on facts found in the Grossology series of books, as well as a couple other random "gross stuff" books I found in our collection. Despite the fact that each team should have had an equal shot at discovering the correct answer, one team dominated the trivia. No prizes were awarded, just a round of applause.

Once we finished with trivia, we kept the kids split into two groups and got to work on making our gross take-homes - fake poop and fake snot. As expected, team poop started at the fake poop station and we switched the groups once everyone got a chance to finish up their disgusting creations. We had some complaints about the fake snot because it was the same recipe we had used in a recent science program AND Holidays at Hogwarts, but we never know if the same kids will show up to everything. Regardless, they all made their snot (which wasn't really as runny as snot) and poop (which was disturbingly realistic). Then everybody got the chance to decorate themselves with a fake wound. This would have gone better if we had fewer kids or more volunteers to help - many of them didn't really understand the concept of using a small piece of tissue to create a wound site, so we had a number of kids leaving with large wads of tissue paper about their person.

We had a prize drawing at the end of the program (they just threw their names in a bucket) for three gross fact books, one winner for each book, and then we sent the kids on their way. I was happy to see many parents wrinkling their noses at our gross creations as the kids left the program. We had an excellent number in attendance and everyone had a good time. We will definitely offer another gross program in the future!