I wanted to post from one of my favorite VBSs (I have a few favorites). We did this one from scratch two years ago. I’ve been waiting to share it for a while, but I never got around to it until now.
Vacation Bible School season is my favorite time of the year. I love the planning, the decorating, and the reactions of the kids as they experience it. Come to think of it, VBS is like Christmas to me, it’s just a little hotter outside.
We decided that it would be really fun to do an island theme, so out of that grew a waterfall and a volcano!
I’ll admit that while I’m not a huge fan of this type of theme in general, I had a blast with this theme! A lot of volunteers came together and really helped. We also got to try a few new things.
The volcano is made out of foam board, and the lava is spray foam. I bought a foam heat tool to make some grooves in the foam to make it look a little more rock-like. I probably could have done a better job, but it wasn’t bad for a first try.
I meant for the volcano to be the main prop, but the volunteer who took care of the waterfall ended up having such a good time with it that it accidentally grew much larger than anybody realized it would. This is probably the only time you’ll ever see a waterfall that’s bigger than a volcano! It looked so amazing that I couldn’t even be unhappy with it.
It looked amazing; there were even white Christmas lights running through it so the water lights up! My volcano did get a smoke machine behind it, so it did get to erupt, but I wish my lava could have been as shiny as the water!
Our foyer/registration area ended up being a masterpiece too. I don’t have to be modest because I didn’t decorate it. This was done by bunching up brown paper and stapling it to the walls for a rock/cave look. Tropical islands have caves, so I felt good about this.
We had a can drive all week to collect for a food bank, so we set up an area with “stone” pillars and a table to collect the food items. My foam tool came back into use with this one. Erika spent many hours hand-carving out these details. We found some etchings of animals on Pinterest that we borrowed for this design. I have no idea who came up with them, but they were amazing!
A tribal island isn’t complete without some sort of totem pole. Since we didn’t want to create any idols, one of my volunteers found an idea for a box totem pole with Christian symbols. It came out pretty cute and filled some space that we weren’t sure what to do with.
Lastly, we decorated the kids’ snack area. For this, we went with more of a jungly look. We weren’t sure how to do this at first, but it ended up being surprisingly simple. It was just a matter of cutting out a ton of leaves from green paper (I cheated and used my Cricut), then we stapled most of them to pieces of twine, and the rest of them to brown paper twisted to look like a vine. We hung them all from the ceiling in some not-quite-straight lines and it ended up looking really good! To fill it out a little more, we found some fake ivy strands that we stapled directly to the ceiling.
This whole thing turned out really fun and the kids loved it! We tried to add fun bonus decorations wherever we could. If you look carefully at the foyer pictures, you’ll see a little crashed boat in a corner of the foyer to tie into the skits, which I wrote with Gilligan’s Island in mind (which is why the boat looks like the S. S. Minnow).
The skits were hilarious. In the skit, three characters crashed a boat on the way to film a reality show “Survivor Island”. Two of the characters think it’s “part of the show”. The girl character, Sydney, keeps trying to use her waterlogged phone to make calls and social media videos. Our volunteer actors really hammed it up and really engaged the kids. The kids ended up being so invested, that one night a kid brought Sydney a charger so she could charge her phone on the “island”, and another night, a kid brought her rice so she could get water out of her phone. It was so sweet!
At the end of the week, the kids all learned to trust in God and pray and that he’ll take care of us, just like God ended up getting our stranded characters off of the island!