Wednesday, August 6, 2014

God’s Little Makers: A Week of Vacation Bible School Crafts

Last week was a busy week of making. During the summer, our church holds a week-long vacation bible school (VBS) camp for parish children. The kids enjoyed a range of activities during the week, all centered around our faith. My particular role in all this is crafts lead. I designed, planned, and led the week’s crafts activities for the kids—for the second year in a row. It was a rewarding experience, and definitely challenging. Coming up with four crafts for 120+ kids ranging in age from preschool to 6th grade isn’t the easiest thing to tackle. My goal was to design crafts that were fun and interesting to a wide age range, able to hit a wide skill-set range, and still tie into VBS theme and message. Here’s what I came up with, starting with day one:

Day 1: God’s Treasures

Our VBS theme this year was “SonTreasure”. The theme was centered around idea of tropical island fun. The message and focus of the week was God’s love for us. One of the requirements I had was one of the crafts had to incorporate the children’s photos. I found these little treasure chests at Michael’s Arts and Crafts and they became the basis for the first craft.
Treasure chests lined up and ready for crafting.
I cleaned out the supplies at two Michael’s stores, one of them more than once, looking for all of these boxes. This was the first craft I had a clear idea on. The kids decorated their chests. First with paints:

Sample chests--testing out the craft with my 5yo.
and later they added acrylic gems as time allowed.

Adding gems

Finished!

Waiting for the trip home.


Before the kids took their crafts home at the end of the week, we added the photos to the chests to remind the kids that they are God’s own treasure.

Stay tuned. Days two through five to follow.

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