Junior & Senior Young Friends

Activities for Junior and Senior Young Friends  (JYF and SYF)

Activities for Middle-school teens (Junior Young Friends) and High-school-aged teens (Senior Young Friends) vary greatly by year depending on the students involved. Currently, these groups are mostly inactive. Please contact Susan Stephens if interested in getting the groups started again. In the past, some Sundays were skipped and some involved neighborhood walks, coffee shop walks, or playing board games. Group leaders or students brought topics of interest for informal dialogue. Usually the JYF’s met separately with hands-on activities while the SYF’s focused on fellowship and conversation with other senior high students. To join our email list for updates on current activities, please contact Sonja Toutenhoofd or Susan Stephens.

 

Opportunities of Interest

Colorado Regional Meeting:  JYF’s and SYF’s enjoy gathering for several days in the fall in Estes Park YMCA of the Rockies and for an afternoon each spring at one of the Colorado Meetings. These are welcome opportunities for youth fellowship.

Mountain Friends Camp:  Camp presents another opportunity for JYF’s and SYF’s from a wide range of meetings to get together. Our students have a great time with old and new friends Mountain Friends Camp and many return there year after year.

Intermountain Yearly Meeting (IMYM):  Teens enjoy time each June with Friends from other mountain states (Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Wyoming).

 

Songs by Boulder Friends Meeting Junior and Senior Young Friends

Silent Meeting (tune of Silent Night)

Silent Meeting

Quaker Meeting

Speak if led

 ** silence **

We all know you’re tired this morning

We hope it is a safe place for snoring

Check my watch how much time left

Thirty second have passed.

George Fox the Famous Quaker (tune of Rudolph the red nosed reindeer)

You know Pennington, Cadbury, Woolman, and Penn

Lucretia Mott and Margaret Fell

But do you recall…the most famous Quaker of all?

George Fox the famous Quaker

Knew that in this world of sn,

If you would go in silence

You would see the light within.

All of the other clergy

Used to laugh and call him names.

They never let poor Georgie

Stay too long, outside of chains.

Then in 1643, George Fox came to say

Thee don’t need to tip thy hat,

We’re all the same and that’s a fact.

Not everybody loved him,

But one by one the people see,

George Fox, the weighty Quaker,

We still remember thee!

A Sample Lesson: Quakers and Calligraphy

As one would expect with Quakers, each class reflects the uniqueness of both the adults and the students who participate. Sonja Toutenhoofd and Marc Gacy almost single-handedly ran the Junior Young Friends (JYF) and Senior Young Friends (SYF) groups for many years as their three youngsters grew. Today I’m sharing a lesson from Sonja as an example of their masterful Quaker teaching.

One sign of an adept teacher is the flexibility and apparent effortlessness of their lessons as well as an ability to tailor the content to the particular students involved. For example, a small group of Junior and Senior Young Friends enjoyed a fun hands-on calligraphy lesson from Sonja. 

As they tried out calligraphy pens and ink, Sonja shared the Quaker tradition of calligraphy, starting with the hand-penned greeting in our entry hall. Have you checked it out carefully? I know I hadn’t, and I was thrilled to see the detail in the writing and to learn that most meetinghouses have a similar calligraphy welcome sign. Did you know that most issues of Friends Journal include advertisements for calligraphers, who hand pen wedding vows? Even young children sign their names on poster-sized wedding certificates as witnesses to a marriage. As a fairly new Friend myself, I hadn’t known this, but the students in Sonja’s class that day know all about it. When they participate in a Quaker wedding, they will understand the process and its underlying history, which she described as they were experimenting with their own personal calligraphy. During the lesson, one student chose to write out some of the testimonies in big beautiful writing: PEACE….

This lesson combines the history we see right on our meetinghouse walls and in the journal on our display table with self-directed student art and writing. It’s a lesson that the kids will remember for the fun of discovering a new art form as they reinforce their identities as Quaker youth.

Friends Committee on National Legislation(FCNL)