Free Bible School Materials

Fishing for Christ Visuals - Day 1

These are the visuals for The Fish with the Coin (and also for the corresponding Preschool lesson).

Peter and the Tax Man

Peter and Jesus

Peter Fishing

Peter Finding the Coin

Peter Paying the Tax

Eating Grain

Accused of Working

These visuals were contributed by Mary Beth Frey.

Soldiers of God Decorations Photos Part Five

Continued from part 4

Up in the auditorium, where the elementary group has their Bible lessons, we put up the armor of God posters. We also put up this big wooden shield one of the women in the church found at a garage sale, a couple of weeks before we started decorating. (I think she said she paid a dollar for it, something like that. The smaller piece on the wall in the teen room came from the same source, as I understand it.) We chose this spot for the big wooden shield partly because this was a good place to put it up high, where nobody was likely to knock it down on someone. Also, there was already a nail there.

As usual, we also put up the flags for our missions-field countries. (Next year, we hope to add a new one.)

Soldiers of God Decoration Photos Part Four

Back to Part Three

For the preschool bulletin board, we did representation of the five items from the Shapes Lessons.

We also put some soldier-related posters on the preschool-room walls...

And on the door.

Continued in Part Five

Soldiers of God Decoration Photos Part Three

Back to Part Two

We put these two posters on the walls in the teen room.

We also hung this item in there, up near the ceiling. we were a bit careful where we put this one. Those aren't real weapons on it, and they aren't actually sharp or heavy, but we still didn't want any children swinging them around hitting people in the face with them. One of our Bible School workers found this item at a garage sale, along with a much larger one that we hung in the auditorium. (I'll include a photo of that one in another post.)

If you can ignore the workday mess for a moment, you'll see here a foam sword, shield, and helmet hanging from the ceiling.

Continued in Part Four

Soldiers of God Decoration Photos Part Two

Back to Part One

We put these two in the stairwell...

These two in the hallway...

These two at the end of the hallway, and this other one over on the other side of the kitchen serving window. (At this point you may be noticing some power tools and other things that seem out of place for a Vacation Bible School. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. As we were decorating, some of the men in the church were also holding a workday, doing maintenance and improvements to the building that aren't directly related to VBS. Those things were picked up before Bible School actually started.)

Continued in Part Three

Soldiers of God Decorations Photos: Part One

For anyone who has not read the decoration posts from other years, the basic jist of what we do is this: we take line art that we find in coloring books or on the internet (most of it this year came from the Open Clip Art Library), and we trace it onto overhead transparencies with wet-erase markers. Then we project it onto a bulletin board, thumbtack up some posterboards, and trace the lines onto the posterboards with pencil. Then we hold a Paint Day, which anyone can help with starting from about age 8 or so, wherein we color in the images with poster paints. It's not necessary to stay completely within the lines, because any deviation less than a marker-width gets covered up in the next step, when after the paints dry we outline them with black marker. Also, even if a little gets slopped too far outside the lines for the markers to cover, honestly, we're our own worst critics. (Once hung, the decorations don't typically get scrutinized that closely.) Anyway, after we outline them, we cut them out and stick them up on the walls with Sticky Tack, or one of the various off-brand versions thereof.