Report from Day 1 of Vacation Bible School

I am spending every evening this week at my church.  I'm the Arts and Crafts Director at our Vacation Bible School.

Last night was our first night, and it went well.  The theme of our VBS is "Weird Animals," and last night we made animals out of paper tubes and Styrofoam cups that I rescued from a café that was going to throw them away.  We had a variety of pipe cleaners and crayons and colored paper.  I was happily surprised with the variety of animals we made.

At first I thought I had made a terrible mistake.  The first group of kids did not dive right in, the way the later groups did.

Some of the children looked a bit baffled.  One said, "I don't know what to make."  I said, "You can make anything you want."  He watched the others for a minute or two, and then he got to work.

In a later group, one child said, "I need a sword."  I said, "Well, you'll have to make one then."

One child decided to work in 2 dimensions.  She drew a picture.  That was fine with me.

Most of the animals would be earthbound, if they existed in real life: we had very few animals with wings or fins.  That's fine.

Every year, I resolve to do more to tie the art in with the lessons.  Last night was no different from any other year.  It was all I could do to keep everyone relatively on task, all I could do to keep utter chaos at bay.  There was no talk of God or how God loves all of us weird animals or anything else.

Maybe I'll do better tonight.  We're making puppets out of paper bags and masks out of paper plates.