This year, our parish didn’t have the money for a fancy vacation bible school curriculum, AND we have no parish life center or classrooms. And you know what? We didn’t let that stop us from throwing an awesome vacation bible school program for our kids! Volunteers came together, wrote their own program this year, and creatively used the space we had available, and it was fabulous! It started with a big meet and greet under a tent and it ended with Friday mass! Here is our week at a glance.
Good news! I now offer a full at-home VBS program for Catholic kids… Summer With The Sacred Heart! This vacation bible school program is chock full of fun crafts and activities for all kids ages preschool through teens. Get your program now!
I do have a bone to pick with popular VBS packages- what’s with the weird “themes”? I mean, if we’re learning about the bible, why did we decorate our whole church like the old west, or like the Arctic with polar bears everywhere? I think that choosing a random additional theme seems over the top and like a far stretch. For our VBS this year, our theme was “Jesus’ Family Summer Vacation”, and each day we learned about a different prophet from the Old Testament. Know what our them was on the day we learned about Jonah? Whales. Not panda bears, but whales. Know what our theme was the day we learned about Daniel? Lions. Not surfing, but lions. Novel idea- I know! 😉
Anywho, our parish doesn’t have a school, so we don’t have a great big facility to host Vacation Bible School. What do you do when you want to have VBS but you don’t have a good location? You just work with what you do have! We rented a tent, made use of our picnic pavilion, and had one station meet inside the church- we even made use of our Mary garden! It all worked out beautifully.
It’s pretty standard for everyone to get shirts at Vacation Bible School, but at our church, each grade got a different color shirt. I thought this was a really cool idea! It was so easy to see where all the kids belonged. Also, do you see our priest in the picture below? It was amazing how helpful and involved he was! 🙂
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I loved that during snack they watched the coordinating Veggie Tales video to go with the day’s bible story. Cute!
I also helped teach all week. They already had a craft volunteer, so I became the “Music Lady”. Until last week I had never played the guitar in front of more than about 10 people at a time, but I’m really glad I did it! It doesn’t take much to impress the kids, so the 6 guitar chords I know worked just fine. By Wednesday I wasn’t even nervous anymore. 😉
I love dressing for VBS because for me it’s a chance to wear outrageous accessories that don’t fly on “normal” days.
for free for everyone to be able to use next year. In order to get that
to happen, I’m going to need to get the permission of everyone who was
involved (because I only developed the music and helped with the church
time) so say a prayer that it works out! I know there are a lot of
parishes that could benefit from having access to a program like this.
You can find some ideas for planning your own Catholic VBS program here. Lots of great theme ideas to choose from!
