The Adventurers Club, an after-school program, meets at Banfield Elementary School on Monday. It also meets at Neveln Elementary School each Tuesday.

The coordinator of this program for boys and girls in grades fourth through fifth grade is Sara Williams. The club is funded by private grants through Hormel Foods and the Boy and Girl Scouts.

Williams is a student in the corrections department at Riverland Community College. She found out about this program through Lisa Lundquist, the human services director at Riverland.

"This is only our third week. We meet from 2:45 to 3:45 after school. I plan the activities for the kids. We are just starting out. The first week we had seven kids and today at Banfield I have four. I have around 12 kids in the program at Neveln," said Williams.

The two boys and two girls that make up the group at Banfield were enthusiastic about the Adventurer's Club. Their parents had signed them up for it and they liked this time of being involved in activities and talking about their lives.

"It is more work than I thought it would be. It takes time finding activities for each week, but I like it," Willliams said.

Alix LeBarron and Samantha Fuller are fourth graders and they are also involved in Girl Scouts Troop 38. Samantha is an animated girl and she had just won first place the week before in the Science Fair. Joseph Siegfreid, a fifth grader was tired, as he had spent the weekend playing hockey.

"I like the different activities we do at the Adventurer's Club. I hope we can go to Dairy Queen for an outing when it warms up," said Samantha.

Joseph said, "I like that we have snacks here the best."

When the weather gets warmer, the Adventurer's Club will be venturing outside to do activities. On this day, Williams was having the four students discuss ways to control their anger and what they could do when they were in stressful situations.

Williams had great patience in keeping the children on track especially when they wanted to jump from subject to subject. The group sat quietly while they checked over their word scramble game. The children had unscrambled the motto, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

Williams had them give examples of this motto. The children listed a time when they had to write a story and when they played sports.

"When something is super hard, you just have to keep trying until you finally get it," said Samantha.