I have been a youth leader for my church for the past 2 and a half years taking care of my group. They were 26 pre-comunion kids which means they where between the ages of 6-9. During those years every Sunday I spent two hours with the kids teaching them catequesis. Usually during summer and Easter we took all the groups to a retire during a weekend, through this time we would make various activities for the kids, these included planning scanvenger hunts, dividing the kids so they could improve their teamwork skills and helping them in achieving different goals they would plan before the trip. The kids where also very small so they would usually get homesick during the nights, whenever this happened I would usually allow them to come with me to the dinning room so they could have something to eat and make them laugh until they felt more comfortable to go back to their rooms, I feel this would come in handy in a camp.
During the summer it would be a bit different, we had a lot of water activities in the swimming pool and us, the leaders, had to pay much more attention to the kids, not only if something happened but also with them putting on sunscreen, drinking enough water during the day and making sure nobody was feeling left out.
What I love most about my job as a youth leader is the relationships I´ve been able to build with the kids, the majority of them have been in my group since they were 6 so the trust we have in each other is beautiful and seeing them grow up is amazing. I also have so much fun with them every week and I believe they are the funniest kids in my church, but that is a very biased opinion.
During these years the hardest challenges I´ve faced have to do with some of the children not being as extroverted as others, I used to get very worried whenever I saw all the kids playing in the break between cathequesis and how some of them couldn´t get included in the group. With these I started to develop some technics that have always worked in order to include a child in a group, such as trying different games so they could get to know each other, having a chat with them in order to figure out what their interests are so I could maybe do some activity revolving them and also showing them that little extra attention that they need sometimes in order to come out of their shell.