Monday, December 21, 2015

Thanking Your "Snow" Many Great Volunteers

Volunteers are an essential resource to the ministry. I want the volunteers that work with our children to feel how important they are to God's work, and I want them to know I recognize their importance. So I am always looking for

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Crossing the Jordan River Dramatization




I saw this Jordan River prop in a little drawing on the Calvary Kids Pages. It was actually designed for the story of crossing the Red Sea. I adapted it for the Jordan River crossing.

It was so simple to make.

I used

DIY Ram's Horns Tutorial






I cannot tell a lie; this project is not original to me. I saw these ram’s horns on the Hands On Bible Teacher Blog Spot. I never would have thought of making them from

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Pumpkin Shaped Fruit Tray





I made this fruit tray a few years ago for a fall baby shower. 

The theme was “Welcome Little Pumpkin.” 










I made templates for the shapes out of

Candy Corn Sign



It’s that time of year again, the air is crisp, the leaves are starting to turn (if you live up north) and people are thinking Fall Festivals. Here is a cool

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Decorating for VBS




Recently our church had the opportunity to be involved in a collaborative VBS. We partnered with two other churches. The VBS was actually held twice, once at the “mother” church and then again at our church a month later. 



We moved all of the decorations down to our church and

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Friday, August 21, 2015

Saturday, August 8, 2015

Holly Wood Squares Review Game - Puppet Style


I saw a great review game with puppets on the I Love Kidmin Facebook page this week. So today, KidFrugal will feature our first guest post. I think it is Matthew's first blog post too. I kind of roped him into it! Here it is:

Friday, July 24, 2015

Reusing Roll Paper

This is truly a Kidfrugal post. What I mean by that is this post is about one of the best purchases I ever made. We got a lot of mileage out of it.

A few years ago, our VBS called for making a road – so I bought a roll of black paper with 1000 feet. Here are some of the things we have done with the paper.



Race track on the floor: we used white duct tape to make the lines on the road.


I literally re-used the same

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Homemade Scratch Off Cards




There are some advantages to a small children’s ministry. One is that you can do fun things like make your own scratch-off cards for the kids. These are really easy to make (if you mix your

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Joseph Rules in Egypt


Drama is one of the finest ways for children to experience Bible stories. Many passages in the history books of the Bible lend themselves to drama. Here we did Joseph supervising the collection of grain during the 7 good years of crops in Egypt.

You will probably have most of the props on hand for this story. You need:

Thursday, May 21, 2015

How God Brought Our Walls Down (Sort Of)




Four years ago I began working my way into leadership of the children’s ministry in our church. There were a lot of changes to be made, and one of the first was updating our facility.

I started by asking a few people for some ideas. One idea that surfaced was to remove

Saturday, May 16, 2015

A "Popping" Good Gift for Your Pop on Father's Day



Recently my husband was in charge of getting offering buckets for a community service planned by a group of pastors. They told him to get Kentucky Fried Chicken or popcorn buckets or anything like that. They wanted 40 of them. 


Well, I found a great deal online for 50. That gave me 10 extra buckets to keep for myself. Turns out they had another 5 left after the event, which we conveniently took off their hands for them!


Now for the best part. I was on Pinterest and I saw this great

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

How To Get a Green Screen for Free...Sort of






I heard a sermon recently on God’s creative provision. The speaker used Elijah as an example. How did God provide for Elijah? Here’s a hint, it was for the birds. The point was, and is, that we should never think God can’t provide just because we cannot see how it would be possible.  So this is a post about how God provided a green screen for our church when it looked impossible.

Friday, April 17, 2015

Communicating with Flare


Anne of Avonlea used to say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Some might call it stealing, but the whole idea of blogs and Pinterest is to give us ideas. So when I saw this great idea for creative ways to communicate on SamLuce’s blog, I stole it, err, I mean imitated it. 


In this blog, Sam did a "self-interview" which is when you write a script and play both parts. You video tape one part and then interview yourself live. I took his idea and used it to make an announcement. Only I shanghaied my daughter into being the interviewee. Since we had just purchased a green screen, we went one step further than Sam and actually put the South Pole behind her.


This was a lot of fun to write and make. Sam also

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Sword Practice with the Word of God


This was a Bible-learning activity that we did in VBS when we did Knights of God by Next Gen 4 Christ. I combined several of their ideas to create this activity.

Goal: To help children learn how to apply the Bible to real life situations. This activity allowed them

Monday, March 30, 2015

Fruit Tray Pineapple Cross





My friend had this cool idea to make a cross out of pineapple for our Palm Sunday breakfast at church. If you want to make designs in fruit trays, you can make templates out of anything stiff and design just about anything you can think of.

Below are the instructions for a jack-o-lantern fruit tray I made for a fall event using cantaloupe,

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Monday, March 16, 2015

Eggcellent Eggcouragement for Helpers at Easter




http://kidfrugal.blogspot.com/2015/03/eggcellent-eggcouragement-for-helpers.html
Easter is almost upon us. How are you going to appreciate your workers?

I have an “eggcellent” idea to share with you. Even though this is really corny, my staff flipped

Monday, March 9, 2015

Bible Times Sunday School Room



This room came about when we were doing a VBS a few years back. The program had scenery you could project onto the wall of a room to make it look like the inside of a Bible time’s home.  I thought we had some rolls of white paper we had made look like stone, and so I planned on doing the whole room instead of just one wall.

Two things changed that.

Monday, March 2, 2015

Candy Land Style Easter Egg Hunt with a Twist



A few years ago we did an Easter Egg hunt as part of our Sunday School Easter Breakfast. We have at least 1,000 plastic eggs, so in order to make it fair, I arranged it so each child would get 14 eggs. To do this, I made up a color coded card for each child. I did the colors much like the cards you pick up when you play Candy Land. So each child would pick up 14 eggs according to the colors on

Thursday, February 26, 2015

The Empty Tomb - An Interactive Easter Lesson




Last Easter I wanted to make an empty tomb for the children to enter for our Easter lesson. I had already covered our puppet stage with stone paper for Daniel and the Lions’ Den. I simply converted it into the tomb.

How to make the cave:



  1. First, I cut an opening in the front for the tomb entrance. I saved the paper I cut to cover the stone I made in step 2.
  2.  I found a large piece of flat cardboard and covered it with the paper from the opening. I needed to add some extra paper to complete the job. This was the stone that was rolled away.
  3. Finally, I covered the rest of the puppet theater with black tablecloths to make the cave effect. You could use plastic ones from the dollar store, black sheets, or even black bulletin board paper if you have it.
That was it. I added an old

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Writing on the Wall, Part 2



Here are the directions for making a few more of the props I used when we did the Bible lesson from Daniel 5 about the writing on the wall.



Golden goblets:

  • I bought dollar store plastic wine glasses. I also found these gold star plates there.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Helping Children Change Lives - One Shoebox at a Time



Since I just pinned a pin about the “store” we run for Operation Christmas Child and said you could check my blog about for more information, I thought I better put some information here. 

We have an ongoing “store” in our children’s Sunday School department. They earn money each week for coming, being on time, bringing visitors, learning the books of the Bible and bringing their Bibles (that last one never seems to work – and yes we do use Bibles in Sunday School). 
The FREE videos are not for OCC. We are just trying to get rid of them!

During most of the year, children can buy things for themselves or gifts to give to others. But starting

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Riding the Camel



This fall my husband and I visited a nearby church when we were on vacation. I was amazed to see a full sized camel kneeling on their platform. Of course it wasn’t alive, but it was big enough for their 6 foot plus Pastor to actually sit on.

This church decorates their platform each quarter to correspond with the theme for their Wednesday night kid’s program. This fall the theme was Wilderness Escape. It chronicled the Israelite escape from Egypt and journey through the wilderness. They had the camel, an oasis, a pillar of fire and

Friday, February 6, 2015

Picture This!



They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I also think pictures make good spring boards for creative ideas.  I tend to believe in the theory of insight learning, where you get that “aha” moment

Monday, February 2, 2015

Feeding Our Fears to the Lions


The idea for this Daniel activity came from the messy church blog. My talented coworker looked at their picture and then made this cool lion mailbox for me.

She found a relatively square corrugated box about 11” X 11” X 9”. She covered the front with tan

Saturday, January 24, 2015

For the Love of Volunteers



I love Volunteer Appreciation. It is so enjoyable to make others feel appreciated. I have a whole Pinterest board of DIY ideas for appreciating your workers, but today, I want to blog about my Valentine one. 

This Valentine Appreciation Tree emerged from the Volunteer Christmas Tree I wrote about in an earlier blog.



For Valentine’s Day, I bought Little Debbie’s for all the workers. Who doesn’t love Little Debbie’s? I put each individually wrapped package in cellophane Valentine bags from the Dollar Tree and hung them on the lighted Christmas tree. My coworker made red hearts with her Cricut to turn it into

Friday, January 23, 2015

In the Lions' Den with Daniel



One of the major VBS curriculums for 2015 is using stories from the book of Daniel, so I thought that I better get the rest of my Daniel posts on here. 



We had a puppet stage that morphed from being the fiery furnace into the lions’ den. The cardboard lion in front of the den was an old VBS prop. It was just made from a picture of a lion in a coloring book projected onto cardboard and painted. 

The paper was leftover from some scenery used elsewhere. We kept the paper on after we finished Daniel and made this into a tomb for Easter.

Hint – ever noticed how cardboard warps if you paint it? Did you know that if you paint the back side of your cardboard it will “unwarp” it? The cardboard shrinks when the paint dries – painting both sides counteracts the shrinkage and you will get a straight piece of cardboard again. You only need a light coat on the back side. (We did not paint the back side of our lion and you can see that it is a little warped.)



We used this puppet stage to make the lions’ den, and then we presented a puppet show. Leo and Lawrence, two twin lions, told the story to us of Daniel and the Lion’s Den.  Here is the script if you

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Do You Want to Have a Frozen Party?

Do you want to have a party?


Last year we did a children’s outreach over the March break for children who didn’t get to go to Disney, but stayed home for spring vacation. We chose to use the movie Frozen as a theme for the party. Here’s what we did:

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Eating the Frog



I have been reading a great book lately on productivity. It’s called, Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy. The premise of the book is based on Mark Twain’s famous quotation, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Brian turns this into a powerful illustration to motivate productivity, only you have to eat

Pirate Themed Trunk & Treat

Shiver me timbers and batton down the hatch, it's trunk and treat time and have we got a theme for you. Be sure to check the video out a...