One Important Thing to Never Forget About Students
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Some of your students are still child-like. And that’s OK.
Two weeks ago, I enjoyed—or endured—the weirdest night of my entire youth ministry career.
Our Sixth Grade Overnighter is a big, fun event, designed to help our newest students feel comfortable in youth ministry.
But there’s one strange variable in place this year:
For some fluky reason, there are only three boys in the sixth grade class, and on the night of the Overnighter, literally none of them came.
It was me, three female chaperones and a dozen sixth grade girls.
This is the story of everything I learned (and then some) when I accidentally hosted a 12-year-old girls’ slumber party.
Before you hear the whole story, let’s make sure you have a pretty good understanding of who I am. I am a 32-year-old man. I have a beard and I wear a lot of plaid shirts and my hobbies primarily include sweating and watching baseball and eating meat.
I have two sons and I also have a 2-year-old daughter who is 10 years too young to provide me with the insight that I gained during the inadvertent slumber party.
(And for what it’s worth, one big positive is that I had a sleeping quarters all to myself. Not a bad perk.)
OK, so the evening went pretty much the way I planned. We played games. We played hide-and-seek. We ate pizza rolls. We watched movies.
Then it was time for the penultimate overnighter activity—a Lip Sync Battle, intentionally scheduled as the last thing we would do before bed. I wasn’t sure what songs a group of tween girls would choose, but I certainly didn’t expect it would be anything like this:
In case you’re not familiar, that’s the song “Pink Fluffy Unicorns
Dancing on Rainbows.” Those are literally all the words of the song.
It’s like My Little Pony for kids who aren’t yet old enough to watch My Little Pony. It’s weird.
And when the sixth grade girl emerged from behind the curtain wearing a full-on unicorn costume to sing a song about unicorns, I cringed for her. I was pretty sure she’d get laughed at and leave embarrassed.
Our Sixth Grade Overnighter is a big, fun event, designed to help our newest students feel comfortable in youth ministry.
But there’s one strange variable in place this year:
For some fluky reason, there are only three boys in the sixth grade class, and on the night of the Overnighter, literally none of them came.
It was me, three female chaperones and a dozen sixth grade girls.
This is the story of everything I learned (and then some) when I accidentally hosted a 12-year-old girls’ slumber party.
Before you hear the whole story, let’s make sure you have a pretty good understanding of who I am. I am a 32-year-old man. I have a beard and I wear a lot of plaid shirts and my hobbies primarily include sweating and watching baseball and eating meat.
I have two sons and I also have a 2-year-old daughter who is 10 years too young to provide me with the insight that I gained during the inadvertent slumber party.
(And for what it’s worth, one big positive is that I had a sleeping quarters all to myself. Not a bad perk.)
OK, so the evening went pretty much the way I planned. We played games. We played hide-and-seek. We ate pizza rolls. We watched movies.
Then it was time for the penultimate overnighter activity—a Lip Sync Battle, intentionally scheduled as the last thing we would do before bed. I wasn’t sure what songs a group of tween girls would choose, but I certainly didn’t expect it would be anything like this:
And when the sixth grade girl emerged from behind the curtain wearing a full-on unicorn costume to sing a song about unicorns, I cringed for her. I was pretty sure she’d get laughed at and leave embarrassed.
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