SVG Documents

A number of the materials, such as craft patterns, decorations, and so on, are in SVG format. We've created them using Inkscape, which can also be used to view or print them. (Inkscape is freely available, so you can download and install it at no cost. I can also convert the documents to other formats (such as eps or PDF) upon request.)

At the time of this writing, I haven't got them all online yet. For a long time we didn't really have a place to put them (online). Update (spring of 2011): Now that we finally do have a place to host them, I still have to get around to putting most of them up. So for now they are available upon request.

I will eventually try to get them all online, at which point I will link to them here, as well as to each of them from the appropriate place (e.g., craft patterns from the instruction pages for each respective craft). But for now, people who need them will need to contact us and request them. If you need a format other than SVG, please specify in your message what format you want (e.g., PDF). To be sure I see your message promptly, include the words Bible School in the Subject.

Themes

God's Sheep (updated, 2013)

Sheep are all over the place in the Bible, used as examples and illustrations for a variety of things in both testaments. They're also cute and make for easy decorations, so naturally we had to use them for a Bible School theme. The lessons we take from this theme talk about sin, salvation, obedience, security, and the church. In Galion this was our 2007 theme, which we tentatively expect to use for the second time in 2013. Most of the materials for this theme are online! To view them, see lessons, verses, crafts, games, snacks, missions, decorations, and SVG documents, or you can use the God's Sheep summary page to get them all in one place.

Soldiers of God

Soldiers and warfare occur repeatedly in both testaments. We thought about doing an entire week on just the armor of God, but we decided it might be better to generalise the theme. We ended up with lessons covering salvation by faith, obedience to Christ, resisting temptation, enduring the world's contempt, and prayer. In Galion this was our 2008 theme, which we tentatively expect to revisit in 2014. Most of the materials for this theme are online! To view them, see lessons, verses, missions, crafts, games, snacks, and decorations, or you can use the Soldiers of God summary page to get them all from one place.

Fishing for Christ

This was the first theme we thought up, and while it's not the most conceptually cohesive, it does make for great decorations. The lessons here are pretty basic, covering the deity of Christ, his substitutionary death, his resurrection, and the commission he gave to his disciples. There is an emphasis on salvation. We re-used this theme in Galion in August of 2009, so we revamped and posted the materials then. The Bible lessons, memory verses, games, snacks, missions lessons, decoration plans and most of the crafts for this theme are online now. You can get them all in one place from the Fishing for Christ summary page.

Following the Footsteps

We wanted to include Old Testament saints in our Bible School, and it seemed obvious we would want to talk about following their example. That sounded hard to decorate for until we realised we could use footprints. After much deliberation we ended up with lessons on trusting and obeying God, studying his word, salvation, prayer, and Christian service. Materials for this theme were developed in 2010 and are now essentially complete and online. See the Following in the Footsteps overview page for details.

Running the Race

We found five passages in the New Testament that speak of the Christian life as a race that we run, and so we wrote from them five lessons that emphasise lordship, faithfulness, the importance of God's word, holiness, and heavenly rewards. In Galion we initially developed these materials for use in 2005, then we polished them up and used them for the second time in 2011, so they're fairly complete at this point.

Back to the Beginning

Sometimes you have to get down to the basics and remember how it all got started. We went back to the beginning and wrote lessons on creation, sin, salvation, faith, and the church. In Galion we tentatively expect to use these materials for the second time in 2012, so we'll be going through them and polishing them up in the coming months. The elementary Bible lessons are already online, and more will be coming.

What is Needed

Generalities:

As a rule, the thing we need the most help with is creating artwork. Besides visuals to go with the lessons, we also need line-art that can be traced on overhead transparencies, projected and traced onto posterboard, and painted for decorations. We can find some artwork on the internet, but we cannot redistribute most of that due to copyright, so we need artwork that can be distributed with our materials, either because we have the author's permission to do so, or because the license of the artwork allows this. (For instance, artwork from the public domain or that is distributed under a BSD-like attribution license can be used, but artwork distributed under the GPL cannot be used, because that license is incompatible with ours.)

None of us at Galion are artists, and it really shows. I had one semester of art in college, so even the visuals we already have are really stretching the limits of my skill. In some cases I can use components from a public-domain source, such as the Open Clip Art Library, but that only goes so far. Also we have used in our own church a number of visuals that came with various purchased materials, which we have collected over the years, but this has two major problems: first, and worst for us, these visuals were not designed to go with our lessons, or with one another, and in many cases are not ideally suited. Second, and worst for everyone else, we cannot distribute visuals for which we do not have the copyright, so those visuals are not included here. We really need original artwork.

With that said, there may be other things we can use help with as well. If you look at the summary pages of each section (lessons, crafts, games, etc), you may find things that are marked as [Needed]. Beyond that, here are some additional things I have noticed that need to be done...

• Most of the lessons currently use a boilerplate copyright acknowledgement for scriptures taken from the NIV translation. For some lessons, this may be exactly what is needed, but for others it may be that many of the scriptures are not verbatim from the NIV, and in that case either an except as noted clause should be added to the boilerplate and the exceptions noted, or if there are fewer excerpts from the NIV they should be noted individually with the short (NIV) acknowledgement and the boilerplate removed. Someone should go through all the lessons and check all the scripture passages to see whether they are indeed taken from the NIV, and make the appropriate adjustments. This is a tedious and largely thankless task, but it ought to be done to be in full compliance with Zondervan's policy.
• The Fish with the Coin lesson needs to have the formatting and presentation cleaned up so that it is more obvious which portions are lines of drama and which are narration or commentary.(done in 2009)
• The teen lessons for several of the years are almost entirely absent at this point. If nobody else takes this on, we will probably get to it eventually, but it would probably not be until the next time around the rotation, i.e., several years.
• For the first several years, we did not script out any presentation for the preschool memory verse. This needs to be done.
• Some of our music selections may come from albums that are no longer generally available. In such cases, it would be good to replace them with recommendations from readily available albums. (The unavailablity of older materials is perhaps the single most annoying feature of the way copyright law works...) (Alternately, if a larger church has the facilities and people to produce and record quality original music, that could, if done well, be even better, but realistically I think recommending selections from existing available albums is more feasible.) In particular, the Sing & Shout Songs albums have unfortunately become rather difficult to obtain of late, and the CEF Celebrate Life in Christ album was probably never available separately. Fortunately, the Hip Hop Hymns album still seems to be readily purchasable, may it always remain so. Bear in mind that when making recommendations we prefer to keep the total number of albums to a minimum, so if possible try to find albums with multiple usable songs. Also bear in mind that we have two very important criteria for music selection:
  • The music must have good solid lyrical content. Extra bonus points if it goes with the theme or, especially, the lessons. We have a limited tolerance for Praise songs — one of them every now and again is fine, but it is not okay for every song to be just that.
  • The music must have a tempo that moves. Children are not interested in singing music that drags like Brahms, turning quarter notes into whole notes and whole notes into multi-measure marathons of interminable note-holding. They will roll their eyes and start talking amongst themselves to relieve the boredom. Therefore, tempo is required.
• Most of the pre-school lessons, and some of the elementary lessons, could use at least minor copy-editing.
• Someone should get a statement from CEF regarding what they view the copyright status of the Wordless Book to be. We've been using it for the secondary preschool lesson every-other year (alternating with our own shapes lessons), but although the wordless book as an idea is older than CEF's involvement with it, and early versions of it are certainly out of copyright and in the public domain, CEF is responsible for the general form in which we have it today, and the use of the color green originated with them, and so I am not comfortable reproducing or distributing our wordless book lessons without checking with CEF. For now I have just linked to their own presentation of it, but that only works for an online presentation — in particular, it would not work for anyone who wants to reproduce the materials in written form. For this reason we should clarify this issue and, if necessary, write an alternative set of five simple lessons, along the lines of what we have done with shapes, but with something else than shapes or colors for the symbols. To work for preschool, it should not rely on the ability of the audience to read.
• Some lessons may be missing some of the references under Bible Passages (or Other Passages). One such example is the Isaac and the Lamb lesson, which does not have any of the references for the last part of the lesson. Also, the Preschool Little Lamb lessons for God's Sheep are missing their references. Someone should track these all down so that they can be listed, or the lessons should be rewritten complete with references.

Overview

What Is This?

We're working on a six-year set of freely-redistributable Vacation Bible School materials. Recent updates are shown on the main page. To see all of the materials we have online so far, use the links in the sidebar under Complete Themes and Bits & Pieces.

Why Are We Doing This?

Several years ago, I got roped into helping with Vacation Bible School at my church. The person who was organizing VBS that year had purchased a fancy Bible School kit that cost the church a significant chunk of change, but it came, supposedly, with everything ready to go. The presentation of the materials was great: shiny visuals, nice-looking handouts and decorations, video segments, crafts and snacks coordinated with the lessons, and so on and so forth. There was even a video to show to potential helpers, to convince them to get involved. The problem, we discovered, was that the lessons themselves were apparently written by one of those people who doesn't actually believe in teaching children anything. Each day's Bible Lesson, and I use the term loosely, contained only a single point from the Bible, along the lines of God Helps Us, God Loves Us, and so on. These things are true as far as they go, but they do not, to our way of thinking, constitute a Bible lesson. Not even the basic truth of the gospel was included, much less anything beyond that to hold the interest and help the growth of children who are already believers. The person who was presenting the lessons ended up rewriting them entirely, so as to include actual Biblical content. I was presenting the similarly deficient video segments, and I ended up rewriting the commentary that went along with them, again so as to include actual Biblical content. I am given to understand that the person presenting the missions lessons did significant rewriting as well.

The end result was that nothing coordinated. With the Bible lessons rewritten, all those fancy visuals and crafts and games and snacks and video segments no longer really went with them in any meaningful way. There was nothing to reinforce the Bible lessons. It was not the experience we really had in mind when we set out to have a Bible School.

The next year we were more careful in selecting materials, and we purchased ones that were produced by CEF in conjunction with FotF. These were rather a lot better than the others, but we found ourselves still disappointed with the quality of the Bible lessons. Yes, the gospel was present, but we still wanted more. We wanted more Bible in our Bible School. It is Bible School, after all.

So we decided to write our own. It's not that much more work than rewriting existing materials to bring them up to our standards. And since we are writing them, we figured we may as well share them as well. At first it was pretty overwhelming, and not everything got done as well as it should have done, but we're getting better at it as we go. Our plan is to create a six-year set initially and then after six years to rotate back through the same ones and improve them.

You can use the links in the sidebar to see what we've got so far.