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

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

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

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,

Disappearing Sins - the Story of Easter

This is a science experiment object lesson that could be used for Easter, or at any time to teach that Jesus takes away our sin. I found it on

Eggcellent Eggcouragement for Helpers at Easter

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

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.

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

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

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.