Pirating Children's Interests

In my former life, I used to work in the children’s room at a local public library. One of my jobs included being in charge of the story programs for school-age children. I often used ideas I would have used in a church program to transition into a book. Here is one of my favorite story time programs that I did: Dress Like a Pirate Day.

Of course everyone including me had to

DIY Giant Fish for Jonah

It seems that there is no end to the giant fish population on Pinterest these days. But just in case you missed them, here is one more DIY post for making a giant fish.

Materials:

5 Steps for Teaching I Samuel 3 - Samuel Listens to God

There are a wealth of sources on the internet for teaching. Here are my top 5 picks for a 30-40 minute class-time (omit #2 or #4 for a 30 minute time slot):

In the Dark with Gideon

What kid wouldn’t love the allure of making noise and getting to play in the dark at Sunday School? That’s what happened when we acted out the story of Gideon from Judges 8. This story was very simple to re-enact. 

Here is what you need:

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:

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

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:

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.

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

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

KidFrugal

KidFrugal is a blog all about making ministry happen when there are no resources to make it happen. It is about doing it anyway, because with God nothing is impossible. It is about doing children’s ministry when you do not have enough workers, money, building space or even kids. It is about making children’s ministry happen in churches with limited resources because we have a God with unlimited resources. I hope to equip you with ideas we have used, and more importantly, to get you