Okay, now that we're underway here in Galion, I've had time to transfer our photos from the decoration days
onto the computer, go through them, and pick out some of the most illustrative ones. This is how we decorated for Following the Footsteps.
The first thing we did was to find a footprint shape. Well, several of them, actually. One came from a cookie cutter that we had (which also came in handy for snacks...). Others came from the Open Clip Art Library and other sources. I think I may have drawn one from scratch as well.
Anyway, we used the enlarge/reduce feature of a photocopier to get different sizes then traced the footprint shapes onto posterboard and cut out footprint stencils, which we then used to make about a bazillion colored footprints (from construction paper, brightly colored cardstock, whatever was available). Here you can see a pile of these footprints sitting on a table waiting to go up. There are more where these came from.
We put them on the walls...
on the ceiling (sorry about the poor quality of the photo, but hopefully you can get the idea)...
and even hanging on a mobile. We also reserved some footprints for use in the auditorium later in the week (which we specifically wanted to go with
the last night's skit).
See the snake hanging separately? We found those cheap someplace (at Dollar Tree, I think), and we immediately thought of
the third day's Bible lesson, so we couldn't resist getting four of them to hang from the ceiling. We put two of them in the main area (the other is shown below) and then we put one each in the preschool room and teen room (both of which I'll get to presently).
We traced one foot outline onto overhead transparency and used the old project-onto-posterboard trick to make big posterboard-sized stencil...
... and took sidewalk chalk to the driveway.
Here's our main bulletin board. I don't know if you can read the little signs there, but they feature names of people from the Bible and traits they exhibited that we would want to emulate— mostly the ones from the Bible lessons, though I think we might have thrown in a couple of extras to fill up the board.
In the auditorium we hung the missions flags as usual (I think I posted pictures of them
last year as well), ran a few more feet up the wall, put up the projector and screen (which we use for lesson visuals and missions maps as well as song lyrics), set up the red/blue team points contest chart (don't worry, it's made to expand when the points go past the first page), and this year we put up a display sample of the t-shirts we're giving out to anyone who brings at least five different visitors.
Here's a close-up of the shirt, which features the Following the Footsteps logo. We've had one child earn a shirt already, in the first two days, so I consider this venture a success. We printed the iron-on patches in two sizes, half-page and full-page, and we bought returnable blank shirts, and we iron the logo onto whichever size we need. And no, I didn't deliberately plan the color of the logo to match the chairs. It sort of just worked out that way. I didn't even know we were going to do the shirts when I made that logo.
Since the teen room is painted blue, we decided to go with white feet in there...
We made some of them large, from posterboard, and wrote their memory verses on them, because it fills up a lot of wall space, and because it looks cool.
Here's the snake we hung in the teen room.
Then there's the preschool room...
Here's the outside of the door. Those are puppy-paw prints, to
go with their Zeke lessons.
Here's the inside of the door, with a trail of paw prints leading up onto the ceiling. Speaking of which...
The secret ninja stealth method of attaching things to false ceiling tiles. Stick a small blob of Sticky Tack (or the equivalent; in the photo we have HandiTAK, which is white but otherwise extremely similar) onto the head of the tack, stick that to the back of the item, and push it into the ceiling. With all the multitudes of little perforations false ceiling tiles feature anyway, nobody will ever notice a few more.
We also hung paw prints from a mobile, stuck them all over the wall, and...
... on the bulletin board, leading to a puppy dog. The dog is made from two sheets of posterboard, using the overhead-projector trick to transfer and enlarge an outline drawing (from a coloring book), which we painted. (Most years we do a lot more painted-posterboard decorations in this style, but this year we went with mostly the cut-out feet instead.)
Here's the preschool room snake.
Did I ever post a photo of the scale we use for our missions offering? Here it is. We found the matching red and blue buckets at Dollar Tree a few years ago, and one of the men in the church made the scale to go with them. We award 500 points each night to the team that wins the offering contest. This is enough to make the offering contest seem important, but one kid on the other team can offset it by saying his memory verse (200 points) and bringing a visitor (300 points), so it doesn't give an overwhelming advantage.
The prize bins, sitting on the registration table.
I took a photo of the registration box (where we keep not just the forms but everything else we use during registration) mainly so you can see the nametags. Those are three-by-four-inch resealable jewelry bags, with red and blue (team-color) construction paper inserts (cut just the right size to fit) slid inside. In front of the construction paper we slide in a shape related to the year's theme (this year: footprints), in white, which makes the child's name show up better, and also makes the name tag look more visually interesting than just a plain red or blue slab. The bag is enough protection (from water and sweat and abuse of all kinds) to allow the name tags to make it through the week in most cases. We write the child's name on the outside of the tag with a marker and use a safety pins to attach it to the child's shirt. When we prepare the blank name tags, we stack them every-other (red/blue/red/blue...), which assists with keeping the teams more or less even. (We often have to dig past a tag or two to grab one of a certain color, either to keep a family together or to keep a visitor on the same team as the person who brought them, but this leaves multiples of the other color on the top of the stack, waiting to go to the next new registrations.)
We also stick these signs on the registration table, delineating the point values.
I guess that just about wraps up the decoration photos for this year. I could post more (there are, for instance, more footprints on the walls than these photos show), but it doesn't seem necessary.
