Catholic Vacation Bible School Ideas

Earlier in the year, I reviewed several Catholic Vacation Bible School packages (and I mean real Catholic packages, meaning they were developed by actual Catholics). Our parish, however, wrote their own program this year, and it was fabulous! They have used packaged kits in the past, but ultimately ended up tweaking them so much they thought they may as well go ahead and start from scratch.

(This is a picture of the last day of VBS-

we ended with a First Friday mass!)

I do have a bone to pick with popular VBS packages- what's with the weird "themes"? I mean, if we're learning about the bible, why did we decorate our whole church like the old west, or like the arctic with polar bears everywhere? I think that choosing a random additional theme seems over the top, and like a far stretch. For our VBS this year, our theme was "Jesus' Family Summer Vacation", and each day we learned about a different prophet from the Old Testament. Know what our them was on the day we learned about Jonah? Whales. Not panda bears, but whales. Know what our theme was the day we learned about Daniel? Lions. Not surfing, but lions. Novel idea- I know! ;-)

Anywho, our parish doesn't have a school, so we don't have a great big facility to host Vacation Bible School. What do you do when you want to have VBS but you don't have a good location? You just work with what you do have! We rented a tent, made use of our picnic pavilion, had one station meet inside the church- we even made use of our Mary garden! It all worked out beautifully.

Obviously a Catholic church is different than most because we have Jesus present in the tabernacle. We made sure to catch the kids outside of the church each day to make them practice genuflecting and making the sign of the cross. We also discussed reverence each day (especially on Thursday when our church time was adoration). 

The kids were actually a lot better during church time

than I had expected- especially on adoration day!

It's pretty standard for everyone to get shirts at Vacation Bible School, but at our church each grade got a different color shirt. I thought this was a really cool idea! It was so easy to see where all the kids belonged. Also, you see our priest in the picture below? It was amazing how helpful and involved he was! :-)

I loved that during snack they watched the coordinating Veggie Tales video to go with the day's bible story. Cute!

I also helped teach all week. They already had a craft volunteer, so I became the "Music Lady". Until last week I had never played the guitar in front of more than about 10 people at a time, but I'm really glad I did it! It doesn't take much to impress the kids, so the 6 guitar chords I know worked just fine. By Wednesday I wasn't even nervous anymore. ;-)

I love dressing for VBS because for me it's a chance to wear outrageous accessories that don't fly on "normal" days.

For instance, I hardly ever get to wear this necklace I made!

I also wore several skirts with my t-shirt since I was mostly

in the church all day. (And yes, the bandana tied on my head

is from World Youth Day Toronto. Whoo hoo!) :-)

On Friday I paired my VBS t-shirt with a crazy tie dyed skirt

and I also wore outrageous jewelry, flip flops, and pigtails! :-)

(Also, this is a picture of me standing with a whale our drama team

made from a trailer and a tent. Isn't it awesome?!)

Even the little nursery kids got t-shirts.

Violet wore hers all week, too! :-)

For my kids who were too small for their shirts, 

I just tied up the extra with a rubber band and rolled the sleeves.

This really was a great program, and I'm hoping to be able to post it for free for everyone to be able to use next year. In order to get that to happen, I'm going to need to get the permission of everyone who was involved (because I only developed the music and helped with the church time) so say a prayer that it works out! I know there are a lot of parishes that could benefit from having access to a program like this.

We had such a fun (and really exhausting week) for VBS. I was actually surprised at how much I learned and grew spiritually during the week as well! Vacation Bible School is a great way to get involved with your church and teach your children about the bible in a really fun way! If you don't have a program like this available, you could just do VBS with your own kids or perhaps a few friends. Holy Heroes provides a free Catholic Vacation Bible School program that can be used at home, so be sure to look into that. 

Happy Summertime, everyone! :-)

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