Fishing For Christ Decoration Plans

• We took some outline pictures of fish (from the Open Clip Art Library and other sources), printed them, colored them with markers, cut them out, laminated, and used Handi-Tak to stick them to the walls all over the place.
• We also hung some fish from mobiles from the ceiling.
• We got some decorative fish nets (Oriental Trading Company sells them) to hang from the ceiling, and we put small stuffed-animal fish in them.
• On the elementary bulletin board we placed pictures representing the Bible lessons: a fish with a coin in its mouth, a whale with the numeral 3, an empty tomb, a fire with fish cooking over it, and a globe hanging from a fishing rod. To create the pictures, we traced coloring-book pictures onto overhead transparencies, projected them onto posterboard, traced, painted, let them dry, outlined in black marker, and cut them out.
• For the preschool bulletin board, we decorated to go with the wordless-book lessons: five vertical stripes in black, red, white, yellow, and green, with a picture on each: a group of children fighting to represent sin, a crucifix, a heart shape, a golden city, and a family going to church.
• We've got one place in our building where we always put a scene made from three large posterboard panels. This year the scene was a path, with hills and mountains in the background, and Jesus is walking the path at one end (the beginning of the scene) followed by a long string of other people, starting with four disciples with a fishing net, then other Bible characters, and progressing to modern-day people, including children.
• For the walls in the teen room, we did continents, with people on them representing corresponding ethnic categories. (Well, we tried. Some ethnicities can be hard to draw if you live in rural Ohio and don't see very many foreigners.) We originally intended to have the people being pulled out of their continents by grabbing onto Bibles or crosses or something on the ends of fishing lines, but it turned out we didn't have the artistic skill to make that happen.
• We're also thinking of using various non-sharp fishing gear (cane poles, bobbers, etc) around the building, probably on the walls up high enough to be out of reach of the younger children.

I've got a digital camera now, so once we get our decorations all put up I'll post some photos. Update: see the first batch of decoration photos.