DIY Scroll

I wonder if Andrew Clements ever dreamed that there would be so many new words in the English language when he wrote the children's book, Frindle published in 1996. It was a book about how a new word gets acknowledged as a new word. Today we have words and terms that my computer's dictionary doesn't even recognize. Terms like DIY and words like repurpose. I looked it up, and repurpose really is a word. According to the online etymolgy dictionary, it became a word in 1983, long before google became a word.

 

But I digress. This is about repurposing that packing paper that comes in all the online stuff we order today. (I wonder when online became a word.) I left file drawers full of this paper at our old church. The first time I unwrapped something wrapped in yards of it, I thought, "This can surely be useful for something." I smoothed out the 10 foot length of it and rolled it up. Sure enough, I found uses for it. 

 

It works great for making a scroll because it is already wrinkled when you get it. All I had to do was cut it in half to make my scroll the height I wanted. You could add dowels at each end, but I didn't bother for this lesson. We just rolled it up from each end, and viola!...a scroll. 

 

I let the children write the Bible verse on the scroll for this particular lesson. It was when Jesus unrolled the scroll and read from Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth. Letting them write it themselves, copying it from a Bible, helped them to connect with the story. When we acted it out and "Jesus" read from the scroll, they knew what he was reading had come from the book of Isaiah because they had copied it themselves.

You can check out the whole lesson on rejection at Nazareth here.

 

I have also used this packing paper to make a cave. Full instructions for that are here.

I could have even made this tree from that packing paper, but I repurposed this black paper from a road we made for a VBS. You can search this blog with the word repupose to see what else we have repurposed. And by the way, in the book Frindle, frindle becomes a word for pen.

By the way, if you are still reading this, instead of getting a new church building, we repurposed these walls for about $500. So instead of a tree today, you will find these themed walls in our kidmin place. Here's what it looks like now:

You can read about our remodel project in several posts I wrote. Click here for one of them.

DIY Empty Tomb

Our neighbors gave us this pop-up tent years ago for the girls and I to sleep out in the back yard. We used it once for that. But in children's ministry I use it at least once a year. Next to duct tape and a kiddie pool, it is one of the most versatile tools I have used in ministry.

It has been the inside of a cave.

Re-purposed Stage Makes the Empty Tomb

Have you ever heard of a buzz prefix? If there were such a thing, I think "re" would be one of them. We "re"cycle, "re"purpose, "re"furbish and "re"store everything today. Instead of throwing out the mouthwash no one uses in our house anymore, I goggled how to re-purpose it. Did you know it will kill the germs in your kitchen garbage disposal?

So this Easter, I thought it very apropos

Journey to Bethlehem

This Christmas season we re-enacted the story of the shepherds in Luke 2 for our children. Remember, this is KidFrugal, so I used what we had on hand. The upscale church might not

The Talking Donkey

Kids just love this OT Bible story for its quirkiness. Quirky it may be, but it carries such great lessons that it is referred to 9 other times in the Bible (Numbers 31:8, Deuteronomy 23:4, Joshua 13:22, 24:9, Nehemiah 13:2, Micah 6:5, 2 Peter 2:15, Jude 1:11 and Revelation 2:14). So I feel it is a story worth teaching.

Balaam’s talking donkey also lends itself to drama. You can act it out with as few as 3 people if you adapt it. So here is what  you need:

• Donkey costume made from a cardboard box. Click here for directions. (I got the idea from Bible Class Creations)

Donkey costume

• Angel costume (raid the Christmas costume box)
• Bag of money (can be a paper bag stuffed with newspaper with $ symbols on it.)
• Sword (Try the

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

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

Fiery Furnace

As promised, here is the rest of the story on Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (or “into – bed-you-go”).

I wrote a drama for this story that uses at least 10 people. You can use 20 or more since you need a crowd for all of the scenes. You can also do it with less than 10 people if you allow some people to have double roles. We used our adult teachers along with the students.

Here is the link for the DRAMA.
Here is the link for the IMAGE I used to make the golden idol.

Scene One takes place in the throne room. I actually have created a throne room for other stories, but I did not think of doing it for this one. 

 

Pictured to the left is the throne room I could have used. To make this room, I hang plastic purple table clothes from rods I have installed in my classroom. I will post more detailed instructions next week. The thrones are actually folding lawn chairs (fit for a king and queen -ha! ha!)

In Scene Two, we find ourselves out in the field before the

Repurposing in Children's Ministry

The Fiery furnace lends itself to drama. It is an easy story to bring to life with just a few simple props. I originally was going to make a refrigerator box into a fiery furnace. However, I found they were not as easy to get as I thought. 

Then our short term mission’s team asked if they could set up our puppet stage, which we NEVER use, so they could practice for their trip. They wanted to know if they could keep it up for the TWO whole months before their trip. 

So here I was with this space hogging stage in my Sunday School area and no place for the furnace that wasn’t materializing anyway. 

"What's a girl to do in a situation like this?" I said to myself.

Then it hit me –