VBS Crafts Days 2 (Wrap-up) & 3

Day 2 will go down as painting wooden snakes with a passel of kids (and leaders since we had enough snakes for them too!). I survived. I had lots of help. The kids all loved the craft.

I was so busy the entire morning that I didn't get a picture of our original set-up before we started preparing the tables. I also didn't get a picture of all the very colorful snakes before they all got picked up at the end of the day. Shame!

We started out with large serving trays from the kitchen (the kind that slide into those rolling carts like you see with bread sometimes). We used eight trays since we had eight paint colors and placed small Styrofoam bowls on the trays. Then we poured paint into the bowls.

We carried the trays around and placed paint in the center of the round tables. We filled enough bowls for two sets of kids to come through in case we had to replace the paint (we have three sets come through). We were able to just switch out a few bowls as they got too mixed up (especially yellow) or pour some extra if they were getting low.

We had four large water bowls on each table for them to clean their brushes. We switched them out before a new group came in. A couple of people would carry a large restaurant bus-type tub and pour the old water into it and wipe down the tables. We would fill the bowls with pitchers of water rather than running them back and forth to the sink. We also cleaned the brushes in a tub of water in between each group.

We gave each of the kids a paper plate. They wrote their name on it and used it for their snake while they were working on it and while it finished drying. Then when they came to pick it up at the end of the day it was also easy to locate. Here is one of only three pictures I took the entire day.

One of the men who is helping set up a large soapy bowl of water with paper towels as a washing station for their hands for when they were done. He was so smart to do that so no one had to be running kids to the bathroom. With our child protection policy, that would have turned into chaos.

Wednesday is always "shirt" day. This year we are making a fringed and tied t-shirt. To keep them modest and not worry about whether or not kids would wear something underneath, I sewed up the sides of the shirts 2" from the edges before cutting them open.

There are no side seams on the shirts that must be cut off.

After I cut up the side of the shirt, I cut little slits all the way up the sides.

Tied one tie in each one of them (front-to-back)

and you have a cute fringe-y, tied Western t-shirt.

There will also be orange, red, golden yellow, blue, and chocolate brown.

I will have to be good and take pictures of the group going into K-1st tomorrow. They are doing their shirts a little different (we are assuming many of them might have difficulty tying if they can at all), but I couldn't take pictures because I don't have a sample.