Club Real—Family & Friend Cooperative
Club Real is a free, and legally amounts to a series of organized playdates. For now, kids must always be accompanied by a parent. Gatherings often include a potluck meal, birthday celebrations, play and social time, and some themed activity and mini-lessons built in. Occasionally someone facilitating may pretend and frame a lore based reason for doing activity.
Our intent is to create a community for kids, families and friends ongoing, and to create some themed activity over our kids’ school years. For now, games, gourd and pumpkin gardening, animals and evolution, LEGOs and some purposeful pretending are our themes.
For now we are mostly loosely, and sometimes more overtly, pretending we’re a type of secret superhero training center. Doing so gives us a fun reason to learn and think on things we might not otherwise. Taking on such a mindset, even in pretend, also engages us in the larger context of our lives that includes others and the world. Also as a super-someone training center, there is some parallel to Club Ideal, so also option for cross-pollinating benefits.
Club Real and Club Ideal
The Fairmount steamHouse is two clubs—Club Real is real and now, and Club Ideal is a delivery device for a developing web series of lessons on metacognition, relationship and health. Each of these project halves has a decade-ish long timeframe—with completion upon the approximate high school graduation date of our kiddos.
The clubs share the setting, and to varying degrees, some similar activity, philosophy (ethos) and lore.
Club Real kiddo activity is appropriate to Romy-ish ages, currently in the age range 5-9ish. Club Real is meant to create community and experience for kids (but also adults).
The Club Ideal curriculum and web series is more geared to young adult aged, or even all humans. Club Ideal is a project intent on creating a curriculum with “broad appeal and objective potency” that is useful for “all humans”. As such the present developmental focus is on metacognition (or thinking on one’s thinking) then next on relationship skills, and eventually, too, on health and fitness.
ETHOS
There is shared philosophy or ethos for both clubs that includes valuing Serious Play, Think Big then Be Real, Strategy, Learning and being Effective Reasonable and Fun. Club Orlo suggests an expanded ethos of “universal styled personal policy planks”.
Serious Play values the benefits of sometimes giving purpose to our play, and sometimes giving some play to our purpose.
Play is safe practice for real life skills. We learn and explore about ourselves and our world in ways that engage us. If we can nudge our play to focus on especially useful skills, all the better.
Adding aspects of play in our work has benefits, too. We learn flexibility, and better endure stress. We become more creative problem solvers.
Think Big then Be Real is a mnemonic to remind us every project or decision begins with a purpose and possibility and ends with decision and action. While both are needed, our activity highlights “Think Big” a bit more. Think Big…Be Real provides a core design philosophy for this project.
Strategy—even that played in a game—reminds us to be clear on our purposes and have an efficient plan in achieving desired ends.
Learning is about bettering ourselves and our thinking, expanding our understandings of ourselves and our world.
Finally, we posit, that every parent for their kid, and probably every person for themselves, wishes to be Effective, Reasonable and Fun. In Club Real, members carry and use their own interpretation of effective, reasonable and fun, while Club Ideal suggests some frames of understanding that might have value for many.
ORLO LORE & MORE
The shared Orlo Lore is that this site is not only a STEAM and social club, but also a top secret “superhero-artist-agents” or “super human” training facility. (Please do not share this with anyone EVER! Unless, of course, they might have interest in playing along, too! In fact, we’d really LIKE you to get the word out to anyone you think is aspiringly effective, reasonable and fun!)
This gives playful reason to do just about anything that might be helpful to do or know, but which might not be otherwise connected!
There is broad tolerance to varying levels of lore pretending. There will be a few of us occasionally doing something semi-scripted, but mostly the storyline just gives lighter hooey reason for doing a wide range of things otherwise good to do.
The Orlo Lore and Ethos has more depth and dimension than is required for any Club Real participants. In all cases, for both clubs and all real kids, there is earnest design in making the experience fun and beneficial.
SUPERHERO-ARTIST-AGENTS
We use the premise that we are a training facility for young “superhero-artist-agents” to tie together the purposes of all our activity. The term “superhero-artist-agents” is intended to highlight not just why (hero), but also how (artist) and a “what” focus on effect (agent). As is true for higher minded themes, development will come in small bits over years with intent on more project based collaborative activity as kids age.
ANNUAL COMPILATION VIDEO & MEDIA ARCHIVE
All participants will have full “personal use only” access to the online archive of photography and video of club activity.
That archive will be used to create an annual lore based fiction that frames our activity somehow connecting to (at the moment) a story of fairy dragons rising again to live among the cucurbita (gourds and pumpkins)!
This archive of media will also be used as background, filler and occasionally focused emphasis in the developing web series that also imagines a super-someone training facility.