Get ready for an underwater adventure and dive into the deep to experience God's friendship with Scuba VBS! This vacation bible school program fully submerges kids in aquatic themed fun while also fostering a deeper understanding of God's word and ever-flowing love. With a variety of cut-outs, notepads, paper and other products, our Ocean collection is ideal for helping directors enhance the Scuba experience with items for decorating, crafting, creating and learning. From colorful fish cut-outs and tropical fish paper, to ocean animal notepads like whales and dolphins, our items are great for embellishing creative backdrops and bulletin boards, crafting flyers and nametags, enhancing craft projects and so much more. So get ready for your undersea escapade into God’s love, check out our collection, and keep reading for fun ideas that will add to the Scuba VBS experience.
Click on the picture above for a PDF you can download to keep our 10 Terrific Ocean ideas in one place for easy reference. And check out our full collection of Ocean items here!
Create Fun and Unique Flyers For Fostering VBS Excitement
Picture this! Summer is quickly approaching and it’s time to announce what this year’s VBS theme is going to be to the congregation. Or maybe you’ve already announced this year’s theme but so far not as many kids have signed up as you would like. So what are you supposed to do in this situation? How do you create that exitement surrounding Scuba VBS and get kids to sign up for the fun week ahead?
There are many ways that you can create excitement within the congregation for your upcoming VBS program. You could create a video to play before or after services, put together a fun skit for church leaders to perform, or if your church has a large social media presence you could even do something like a facebook post or social campaign. It doesn’t have to be super complicated and flashy though. Many times the simple approach is the best one and creating excitement can start with great with a great announcement and consistent themeing. For Scuba VBS, immerse everyone in the underwater theme immediately with an announcement flyer printer on fun ocean and water themed paper.
We have designer paper that would be perfect for creating flyers to hand out to church or even community members. Our Tropical Fish Designer Paper takes you underneath the waves and brings you to the ocean floor where a variety of colorful tropical fish swim around the page’s border. Who wouldn’t feel transported to the deep with this paper? Our Liquid Designer Paper would also be a great option, with multi colored blues that are sure to remind someone of water or waves. Being laser and inkjet printer compatible, it is easy to type up your flyer with all the VBS details and print multiple copies to hand out to members, put up on bulletin boards, give to kids at religious education or Sunday School classes, or even place around the community. Our paper can also be used in copiers as well, making reproducing your wonderful design a breeze! Easily let everyone know that they’re welcome to join you on this fun and unique adventure to celebrate God’s love.
Another great way to get kids excited about something is to involve them in the process. So why not make creating these VBS flyers a fun activity for the Sunday school or religious education class students.Once the theme is announced to the congregation, have the kids design their own flyers for around the church. They could use ocean themed notepads or art supplies like markers, pencils and pens to make their own creations. There are so many possibilities for involving the kids creatively and getting them excited about this year’s VBS theme!
Create Immersive Experiences with Unique Backdrops
As we said, themeing can be important when it comes to building excitement for an upcoming event, especially when it comes to Vacation Bible School. From the moment you announce the theme to the time the kids come into the sanctuary during VBS week, you want to create an immersive experience that fully brings them into the lessons about God’s friendship and love. A great way to create an immersive experience is through unique decorations and backdrops. For Scuba VBS, you want kids to feel like they are diving into an underwater environment, so why not bring the sea floor to your church hallways. With some craft supplies and some creative shapes, you can easily make it seem like the kids are traveling across the bottom of the ocean as they swim to each activity. For example, you could get some craft paper or construction paper and line the hallways in a way that makes it look like the ocean floor and some waves. Create some coral shapes and then for a finishing touch add some fish notepads or Ocean themed cut-outs to populate your undersea world. Creating a fun backdrop like this would be a great way to also build excitement about the program. Craft an ocean corner at the entrance to the church or santuary to remind everone that your ocean themed VBS is approaching.
Again, creating an immersive experience doesn’t have to be complicated. You can keep your decorations simple and string some ocean creature cut-outs together to create fun garlands you can hang from the ceiling. It still ties in the ocean theme without all the effort of creating a full backdrop experience. You could even use colorful fish cut-outs to lead the groups to each activity. For example, follow the blue fish to deep bible adventures, follow the yellow fish to tidal treats, follow the red fish to reef rec, etc. Or use a different ocean animal for each activity. The possibilities are endless when it comes to your ocean themed decorating.
Create Unique Nametags to Keep Groups Organized
Vacation Bible School has a unique format in that the day begins and ends with everyone coming together, generally in the sanctuary, for announcements, worship and songs.Then the rest of the time everyone is broken up into groups, in this case crews, to rotate through the rest of the activities that tie into the days bible story, verse and theme. For Scuba the different stations are imagination station, deep bible adventures, sticky scripture, reef rec and tidal treats, before meeting back as the large group for the fin-tastic finale. With so many kids moving from one place to the other it can be hard to keep track of who belongs in what group. Even though the groups are small with maybe a dozen kids and a few leaders, that is still a lot of people to keep track of. That is where our notepads would be beneficial for creating unique nametags to differentiate the different crews from one another. Not only would it help the crew leaders keep track of the kids in their group, but it can also be a great souvenir for the kids to keep as part of their VBS memories. With a variety of notepads that reflect ocean themes and animals you can easily assign a notepad to each group and create name badges for them to wear. With a collection of notepads that contain a fish, dolphin, whale, octopus, turtle and other themed shapes there’s something for every crew! And with 50 sheets per notepad and the design on all of the sheets it’s definitely a VBS friendly quantity.
Have a really small or large group, or only want to use a few notepad designs? You could still easily differentiate between crews by placing the notepad on a colorful construction paper or cardstock background. Then simply cut around the notepad shape leaving the colorful border. That was you can still tell who is a part of each crew by what color their nametag is, not necessarily the notepad shape or design.
Emphasize the Daily Points with Fun Bulletin Boards
One of the unique things about the VBS program is also the daily bible points that kids learn. These daily lessons are usually accompanied by a bible verse and a story that corresponds to the day’s activities and also emphasizes the main overarching theme for the week-long VBS. These bible points are the core of VBS, so besides going over them each day what’s a fun way that you could display them for kids to remember?
A great way to present these bible points, or even review them with kids throughout the week, would be to create a fun bulletin board showcasing the points for the week. You could do this in a number of ways. One way that you could do this is that you could create an interactive bulletin board. To begin, you could create a base bulletin board design that reflects the decorations of the theme, such as creating underwater paradise using various ocean notepads and cut-outs. Once you create your bulletin board it can be displayed in the main part of your church or in the area where you hold the opening and closing celebrations. As part of the finale each day, as a large group you can go over the bible point for the day and add it to the bulletin board. Add a new bible point and by the end of the VBS week you will have all five main bible points on the board.
Other Creative Ways to Enhance the VBS Experience
Program leaders and directors can be as creative as they want when it comes to adding finishing touches and enhancing the VBS experience for kids. As we said, creating an immersive environment is really the key to helping kids to not only learn lessons about God’s love but also making VBS a great memory and an experience that kids will want to participate in year after year. For example, you can bring the ocean themeing down to even the tiniest details, such as including a fish notepad with the snacks and creating a “fish food” snack mix. This seemingly little addition is such a unique element that kids are sure to remember, talking about how they got “fish food” as a snack.
These are just some ways that our Ocean themed items can be incorporated into your Scuba VBS program. However, the sky really is the limit; all it takes is some imagination and a creative shape! With our proudly Made in the USA products, we are committed to creating high quality items that can be used and enjoyed by all ages for crafting, decorating and creative play. So bookmark these ideas, explore our website and ocean collection and see how our items can be a vital addition to your VBS toolkit.
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