Starting and Joining Clubs

crewchick
Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:25:44 +0000

I actually started a club extremely similar to this my last year as a junior. I loved it and wish I had started sooner. I might wait until next year so that you feel more comfortable in your high school. More kids will join your club to help you when you are older. In terms of time commitment, I estimated mine to be about 100 hours of work total, but it started as a girl scout project which added time. I would estimate for every two hours of club for little kids, it takes 2-4 hours to plan and set up.

Try and test experiments first, make sure you have enough materials etc. I also found adults working in math and science to come and talk and then the activities were related which added on to the planning time. Some of the biggest challenges you want to think about are location, adult present, and forms. Most parents will be wary of sending their kids to a club run by a single high schooler with no adults presence.

Also, you probably want to collect emergency medical information and emergency contacts (what if you are using cornstarch to make oobleck and a kid had an allergy you didn’t know about? or a latex allergy?) Also, you might need to consider if you want to get insurance. In addition, location matters. If you want to do a computer science activity, you probably need internet and computers (fyi-scratch is a great program to use with little kids).

A lot of this planning involves extensive communication with adults, which is really hard at first, but gets easier with time. That would be one more benefit of starting it older, more experience and maturity. That kind of communication requires maturity. I happened to have done a different project that involved a lot of adult communication when I was a freshman, and so had experience. Freshman year though, I had my mom proofread every single one of my emails.

Let me know if you have more questions about this.