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:

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

Getting Back in the Tube

I have had my share of flops in the ministry. Generally I find that if you plan well, pray, and work hard, things go alright. But there are times when things do not go well. There are times when I have tried new ideas only to ruin all my visuals. I’ve bombed

Christmas Gifts for Kidmin Children

Do you buy gifts for the children in your children’s ministry? I stumbled across a great gift for younger children this year. Avon has cool Bath Time Body Paints that go along with Uncle Charlie’s “Fruit of the Spirit” song.  

It is just like Avon created these for the song. They carry 5 out of the 6 fruits Uncle Charlie uses. There is banana, coconut, grape, watermelon and cherry. Someone needs to tell Avon to make lemon too! 

These paints are actually soap, but it rolls on in color. Apparently even some adults like using it

Writing on the Wall Magic Window

Here is a cool craft we made for the story of the writing on the wall in Daniel. The drawing of King Belshazzar is by Jesus Rolon from his site, Crafting the Word of God. I revised his drawing in order to make it into a magic window craft. You can find the original picture here.

Magic window crafts have been around for a long time. They are a great way to illustrate any story with change in it. I first saw them used years ago as a VBS craft to illustrate regeneration through faith in Jesus. The picture changed from black and white to full color as you pulled it out of the frame. 

The secret is that there is a second picture hidden behind the back of the frame. The top picture is printed on a transparency. When you pull the picture out to the right, the “hidden” picture behind the frame is exposed under the transparency, revealing something new or changed. In this case, the writing on the wall.

Angela Howard at Bible Class Creations has an excellent video on how to make magic windows. I got my inspiration for this window from her instructions. Here is her written tutorial.

In this craft, when the picture of King Belshazzar is pulled out of the frame, a hand and the writing on the wall appears.

For this craft you need: