A summer vacation is often littered with bored children looking for something to do once the rush of freedom from school finally wears off. The Boys and Girls Club in Yorkton is starting an evening drop-in program to give kids the chance to participate in fun activities and give parents a break for the evening.
On Monday and Tuesday evenings this summer kids between 6 and 12 can go to The Outlet at 54c Smith Street East from 6-8 p.m. Waiting for them will be a wide variety of activities, from art to cooking, as well as different challenges and games.
Brittany Ayers and Karlyn Neal are running the program, and Ayers has big plans for the program over the summer. The goal was to have crafts that parents can display with pride as well as cooking activities that end up with good food. Each week also has a theme, with the coming evenings being focused around a beach theme for different activities. Ayers hopes that they see a lot of kids take advantage of the program, because she has plans for a lot of cool activities for the kids.
The program is a bit of an experiment, Ayers says, since it’s the first time they have offered an evening program in the summer. While they have popular evening programs during the school year, as well as a day camp during the summer months, this is a new venture for the Boys and Girls Club, and they want to see if there is a demand for evening programming. Ayers says they want to make a program that kids like as much as other evening programs the club has ran at other times in the year.
“Our evening programs did really well in the past school years, the kids really loved it and you would get regulars every single day.”
If the experiment succeeds, they plan to make the evening program a regular feature in the summer months. Whether or not that happens depends on how many kids they get in the program and how much demand there is from families to have evening programming for their younger members.
