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

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

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

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

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

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

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: