Getting Ready for Vacation Bible School: Everest!

Out of everything my job entails, Vacation Bible School is THE week of the year that takes time, preparation, planning planning planning....and - horror of horrors! - DECORATIONS. Decorating is probably the thing I am absolutely the worst at. This year, I chose Group's "Everest" VBS program, which on the whole was super great - but it required lots of setup and decorations. Thankfully, I had the Decorations CD, clipart, and LOTS of help!


I actually started setup about a month ago when I raided my mom's basement (yes, I still do that... way more than I care to admit) for camping supplies to set up a Base Camp in the Narthex. This became our main advertisement on Sunday mornings. You'll see we had a hammock, a tent and sleeping bag (which was a HUGE hit with the little kids - I was routinely finding several kids curled up in there between services!), two backpacking backpacks, a camp kitchen setup with pots, pans, and a traveling stove, and other random camping accessories. I printed out some of the camping paraphernalia clipart that wasn't very accessible to us physically from the Everest CD and hung them up - an oxygen tank, boots, rope, and a pickax. Next to the "Base Camp" I hung a banner (which I FINALLY figured out how to make.... but still can't figure out how to print... Oops!) under which we stood during services to pass out flyers and registration forms.

All that setup actually became SUPER handy when it came time to set up for week! We held our Opening and Closing in the family center, so most of my decorating attempts were focused in there. We started by just moving the entire Base Camp set to the front of the gym, and it looked really great! It was missing some mountains, though, so this is where I got my helpers involved.

I read the decoration guide from Group and I even went so far as to watch the Decoration video, but when I went to Joann's and was asked to shell out $40 for each sheet of foam (and you need, like, 6!), I balked. I could not imagine spending over a hundred bucks on decorations! What!! So instead, I went the cheap (but admittedly, not as pretty) route and rolled out the paper. We drew a mountain on two big pieces of white paper and stuck it up on the wall. Then, my middle school helpers worked VERY diligently to build what they called a "glacier" out of posterboard and foam, and it even stood up by itself! Maybe it didn't look a TON like a glacier, but it was something white anyway :-)

That made up the entirety of our Base Camp decorations! I had two other decorating forays:


To signify which rooms were part of VBS, I taped poster border up on the doorways, facing backward so the white part was showing. It ended up looking a lot like snow or icicles hanging down!

By the registration desk, we worked VERY hard to make an "Ice Tunnel." I had seen tons of super cool-looking examples online, but couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make one! So, I ended up taking the easy way out and covering a toddler play tunnel with white plastic tablecloths. Maybe it didn't look AWESOME, but the kids sure liked it :-)

That's it! That's the extent of our decorations, for the most part. Fingers crossed for a good and accident-free week!

Easter Egg Shenanigans!

As part of our family fellowship initiative this year, I wanted to do something REALLY FABULOUS for Easter this year. We had done tiny little through-the-church Easter egg hunts before, but I wanted something GREAT to really bring in the community and involve families in the awesomeness that is Easter!

SO, in striving toward that goal, we had a community-wide Easter egg hunt on the Saturday morning before Easter! It was (really really) cold, but we had it outside anyway- the eggs were not too hard to find! I set out every obstacle I could find from our craft closet to make some of them trickier, but honestly, I think egg hunts are harder for the hiders than they are for the hunters! We tried our best:

Even so, most of the older kids had a very easy time finding their eggs. In retrospect, we didn't even need this cute little preschool area, because even the "harder" ones were way too easy! How do you make it harder to find brightly colored plastic eggs in an open field?! But seriously, I want suggestions!

In an effort to make it a bit more fair, each child was allowed 1 egg of each color, but there were also larger multicolored eggs ($1.50 for 8 at Meijer!) that served as "bonus" eggs. They were allowed to keep any of the bonus eggs they found! We tried to hide those a little better, but again... Way too easy :/

Anyways, after finding our eggs (in retrospect, it was a good thing that it didn't take too long to find them, because it was SO CRAZY COLD!), we shepherded everyone into the family center for more activities!

Each person got a coloring book, which you can upload here (or make your own- it was super easy!). Each page asked them to open one color of egg. I got this amazing idea from Ministry-to-Children, who has their own free coloring book too! I had actually used those prizes and books last year, so I wanted something fresh for this year. :) The materials I used to fill the eggs were:
Green: Palms
Blue: Silver chocolate coins (the cheapest I found were on Amazon)
Orange: Candy cross bracelets from Oriental Trading
Pink: Nothing!
White: Cross eraser from Oriental Trading (I know Ministry-to-Children uses these, too, but they are just SO AWESOME I couldn't resist)
Purple: Bubbles
Yellow: "He Lives" stamp from Oriental Trading



The bonus eggs were filled with candy - definitely a hit with the kids!

We also had other activities for the early finishers! We had egg dyeing:

I made the dye myself out of vinegar and food coloring using this recipe. SUPER easy and WAY cheaper!! I also hard-boiled all the eggs the night before by baking them in a muffin pan. What?! I had no idea you could do that until I found this on Pinterest. Seriously though, it was SO much easier and faster and I only cracked one egg!

We had "pin the tail on the Easter bunny," for which we used this giant bunny that my sister drew by hand! Isn't she the best?!

Outside, another helper was running relay races - the bunny hop (using a big garbage bag to make sure we didn't walk, since I couldn't find potato sacks anywhere), and an egg race (they had to race while balancing a hard-boiled egg on a spoon).

It was definitely a hit! I liked having it on a Saturday morning because it pulled in more of the community members who might not want to brave church on Easter Sunday. Even though next year I hope it will be a bit warmer, this was definitely a successful fellowship event!

Creation in 5th and 6th Grade

The first lesson we tackled with our 5th and 6th graders was, naturally, the first Bible story: Creation!

Since most of the kids have heard the Creation story ad nauseum, we had to mix things up a little bit to get them interested. We started with a "wiggles-out" game - Flicking a paper football through a "goal." They struggled a little bit with this, to be honest- which totally surprised me. I thought preteens LOVED that game. Turns out, they could use a lot more practice!

Then we started our discussions. We thought about what "creation" meant, making a huge banner with the word CREATION. We read three Bible passages about creation, and after each one every kid drew another picture of one thing that God created. After the (giant!) banner was filled with drawings, we looked back at it and asked if God thought alllllllll of those things were good. The answer was a resounding, YES- although we did have some discussion surrounding whether certain things really were "good." After lots of thinking, we decided to table the issue until next week (Adam and Eve).

Finally, we got to the good part: Making our own creations! We has some super creative groups. They were given a random assortment of materials to help... 

Froot loops, paper plates, toothpicks, duplos, and more.

And check out what they came up with!

Then we discussed what was good about our creations. We all decided they were very good!

Happy creating!