CTK VBS

I don’t remember if I mentioned before, but I recently took on the mini job of Children’s Ministry Director at our little church in Sedro-Woolley. I am in charge of making sure that there is a place for kids with teachers ready to go each Sunday morning.

Many churches put on Vacation Bible Schools in the summer and we wanted to see if we could do a little something too. Instead of a full week, we decided to put on a one-day event in the park. We don’t have a church building (we rent the local community center on Sundays), so VBS in the park was a great way to get around that obstacle.

Since the Olympics are coming up this summer we decided to go with an Olympic theme! Most churches these days buy a program for their VBS, but I made this one up from scratch. For the last couple months I’ve been working hard to get it going.

I altered a logo I made for my last year “Mommy and Me” camp for my girls to include the Olympic Logo and it turned out so cute…so we ordered tshirts for everyone.

Here the girls are painting a banner for me. I traced it on this drop cloth by using our projector to cast the image on the fabric.

After all the preparation, Friday, June 29th was the day. We’d been praying for good weather and we got PERFECT weather! We were so thankful. We had fun putting up some colorful decorations. The girls were good helpers that day.

We had four different stations of activities and three group sessions with music and a message. At each activity the kids got a card with a verse on it. We had silly games, skits, great music, fun crafts, and even an object lesson snack.

We had four units of kids divided up by their age. Each “team” decorated a flag before things got started.

We kicked everything off with the Olympic Fanfare music and a torch/flag ceremony.

Aren’t our shirts cute?! I just love them.They have our church logo on the back too.

Here is Kelby helping at the craft station. They were making God Medals…instead of Gold Medals. They wrote their own personal goals on the back.

I shared a little bit at each of the group sessions, then I ran one of the game stations during the rest of them time. I was quite busy, but I loved being engaged with the kids the whole time!

Here are some the kids on Tegan’s “team”.

We had fun grooving to some old school fun kid songs! John even made up a song just for us!

This was a target for our “javelin” throw.

There were about 45 kids there that day. Here they are all together for a group session.

At the end of the day, we wrapped it up with a free hot dog dinner for the families! It was amazing. The kids had a great time. Although the adult and youth helpers were exhausted by the end of the day, I think they had a pretty good time. The format worked great and I would do it again next year with only a few changes…like me delegating more. I’m not a very good delegator!

The fun didn’t stop Friday night! To finish out the athletic theme, we challenged the kids to come back and run/walk the Sedro-Woolley Fun Run on the 4th of July. These are the kids that took the challenge! They looked great running down the street in matching shirts.

Here they are after their hard 2 miles!

After the race, we all joined in the local fun by entering a float in the parade. We just recycled our VBS decorations and made an excellent showing as a float! The kids all had great fun riding in it this year. We handed out lifesavers and some flyers to the people on the street.

I am proud of what we accomplished with all this fun. We’ll never know what seeds that we planted will grow into for God, but I am sure that there will be some fruit from the efforts. I see it already in the camaraderie between the adults and kids…just getting to know each other better!