V-B-S ! V-B-S !!

Yes campers, it's that time of year again, time for Vacation Bible School (cheer)

This will be the third or fourth year that we have used VBS from Group Publishing. We started using stuff from Group (instead of our denominational publishing house) because Group had a "rotation stations" type of setup. What this amounts to is that each day (or night) of VBS you are teaching the same lesson to each age group using the different methods of learning. So one station is a video emphasizing that night's "Bible Point", another is a crafts station (emphasizing the same Bible Point), a games station and, my favorite, the station were a lesson from the Bible emphasizing that day's Bible Point is acted out. Its kind of fun building the "sets" for that Bible lesson station but they're different every day!

We have spoken to the representative from our denominational publishing house on more than one occassion about the fact that we were not using "in house" VBS materials and why. I am now seeing an interesting example of "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". Over the course of the past five years our denominational publishing house has come to, bit by bit, imitate this form in their VBS program. I am one of the greatest proponents of any church using materials produced by their denomination's publishing house (for a number of reasons) so we have, on occassion, reviewed the literature available in this department [children].

I am very blessed on my Sunday School Committee to have children's teachers with (literally) more years of experience than I am allowed to tell. (One of them started teaching little children's Sunday School when she was 12 and another started teaching little children's Sunday School when she was 14, so they think if I tell how much experience they have, that it will make them sound old)

So based on these ladie's expertise, we have continued to use the material that is most suited to the children's ages. When the material from the denominational publishing house is age-appropriate, we will buy it. (i'll shutup about that now :-)