We enjoyed a busy week of vacation Bible school at our church this week. I taught the young 3s class and thought you might enjoy a peek at our simple crafts and favors. First up, cute tin buckets from the dollar section at Target embellished with a chalkboard vinyl sticker. Before class I used a scalloped circle punch to punch the stickers from a roll of adhesive chalkboard vinyl. Filled with sidewalk chalk, also from the dollar section at Target, these buckets made a great take-home favor and classtime activity. My 3-year-olds loved drawing on the sidewalk outside the church building, and at 5 and 7, Emma and Mary Ashley have been eager to use the extra buckets of chalk at home. (Wouldn't this be a cute and inexpensive birthday party favor?)
Monday night our lesson centered on the bronze serpent of Numbers 21:9: "So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live." Taking a Bible story about snakes and making it cute is a challenge, but we did our best to keep the lesson preschool friendly. We began class playing with Wonder Dough from Dollar Tree (containers wrapped in scrapbook paper from Hobby Lobby). I showed the children how to roll worms and snakes with the dough, then told them the biblical account of Numbers 21. Next we played with plastic party favor snakes from Dollar Tree and sampled Sour Neon Worms from Hobby Lobby. Then we made our own version of the brass serpent on a pole.
Last year Emma's preschool teacher had me make worm pencils for a classroom favor, and this seemed a perfect craft for our Bible lesson. The children chose their favorite color pipe cleaners and pom-poms, and we teachers hot glued the pom-poms and googly eyes to make serpents. With assistance, the children twisted their snakes around pencils from the dollar section at Target. (And I bet you never expected to find snakes on A Little Loveliness!)
Our theme for the week was GPS: God's Perfect System. So in keeping with an auto travel theme, I let the children make their own cities using plastic foam sheets and stickers from Hobby Lobby. Each child was given a large green sheet to fill in with roads cut from black sticky-back plastic foam. We teachers helped add yellow lines down the road with thin strips cut from sticky-back foam, and the children embellished their cities with street signs, flowers and lady bugs. Cars from Dollar Tree (not pictured) provided driving fun at the end of class.
The last night we sent our 3-year-olds home with plastic bins from Dollar Tree, personalized by my co-teacher with her Cricut
and filled with goodies from Dollar Tree. Our bins were handy for carrying home extra treats, like the wooden cars from Oriental Trading the children painted in their preschool activity room time.I am already missing my sweet class of 3-year-olds and hope they enjoyed our time together in VBS as much as I did. Don't forget to check out our newest book club selection and register to win a copy in my previous post. Have a safe and happy Fourth of July weekend!
