Sky Vacation Bible School Theme

 A few weeks ago we had a fantastic Vacation Bible School! This was our first year using the Group Publishing curriculum, which really impressed us. They had tons of hands on, small-group activities and key points each day that really drove the lessons home. The songs were fun and got the kids moving, but they had a great message. The Bible stories were amazing - I'll try to post about those later.

The main auditorium is where we have our opening and closing sessions, so it's decorated to the max. Some easy ideas for any flight/sky theme:

1. We flew objects all over the room by hanging them from vents with fishing wire, such as kites, small airplanes, and hot air balloons. To make hot air balloons, blow up beach balls and attach a basket with ribbon for hot air balloons. Our "baskets" were small round tupperware containers covered with brown construction paper. You can also use empty rolls of packing tape. How easy is that?

2. To make a large hot air balloon, just tack up the sides of a pre-school parachute activity toy to the ceiling, and hang streamers down from it. We used flexible cardboard to make a round basket, but you could use a large box to make a square design, or cover any large container with brown paper.
 
3. A balloon column is semi-easy to make yourself and looks great! I made these in about an hour each, and it was my first time - a great tutorial is here.  I didn't know you can purchase gel to make your balloons stay inflated longer - in the heat of summer our air-filled balloons looked good 4-5 days.

4. Clouds

We used tons of white balloons to look like clouds all around the floor. Simply tie two balloons together, then tie another set of 2 together, and twist the centers around each other and have 3 balloons as the base and one sticking up (see pic above).

The other 3-d clouds were made by cutting cardboard cloud frames and covering them with batting. We spray painted a little blue in ours, but you could also glitter, or just leave plain. (The cloud background was purchased from Oriental Trading and was worth every cent! They have the sky decals you see, too).

5. Rainbow streamers - You'll see these in two places, on the walls of the church and on our giant hot air balloon. Streamers are cheap, simple, and add a splash of color. We strung a fishing line to hang the streamers on top, then taped them to the wall on bottom and covered the tape with clouds.

6. Ask around and see if you can borrow large kites, inflatables (we scored a B-W bomber inflatable raft!), and such. This bomber was a great focal point to our lobby entrance.

 7. Another fun idea - use cotton or leftover batting to "write" messages in the air!

 We had a blast brainstorming and decorating for this week, and the kids raised enough money to purchase 50 mosquito nets for kids in the country of Mali! They made cards to go along with the nets - what a great way to for them to realize they can make a difference!
 

We set up a net and mock bed so the kids could visualize our goal.

 Here are a couple pics from that week so you can see what it was like - it was definitely our favorite Bible school yet, and no question we're planning to use Group again!