More on VBS

After a long break, I am finally sitting down to do blogging again. With Brian Zeisets visit and all the daily life things happening, I just didn't get it done. So I guess I will start where I left off and hopefully catch you all up over the next couple of weeks.
  We had a wonderful week of VBS. We had considered every thing that could go wrong and were pleasantly surprised at how well things went.
  So we started with registration. It took some thinking and planning but eventually we got a good system.

The first night there was just a mob of children. And after we signed them up and gave them a wrist band, some of them didn't understand what was happening and wandered off.

Someone figured out that if we lay the ropes on the ground and got them to stand on the color rope they were with the day before, it gave some order to the process.

We wrote their name and age down and gave them a wrist band the color of the group they were with. Merlin and Bethany were group leaders for the orange group, so each child for their group got an orange wrist band and then went and sat on the orange mat.

Mama Justina loves to sing and she had so much fun leading songs and keeping the children entertained till it was time to start.

The children loved her songs and it kept them busy and happy while we finished registration.

Then one of the men told a Bible story with Kojo interpreting After the theme song and prayer the groups were ready to move on to the different stations..

To move between stations all the children with green wrist bands held onto the green rope. This kept the groups together and organized. They did really well with it and it was definitely one of the reasons things went smoothly.

There were four stations and the groups rotated so that there was always one group at each station. Amy did review of the lesson that had been taught and an object lesson to go with it. Jarah translated for her.

Gloria played a game with them.

I did a memory verse and sang with them. My God is so Big and Deep and Wide were the favorites. Samed helped me lead a few Fante songs too.

Wanda and Tynisha did craft. They played with play dough one day and colored pictures the others.

When we finished with the groups, we each gave the group that was in our station a small gift. Then they were dismissed to go home. They always hung around getting as much attention from us as possible. Some of their prizes needed explaining. Glow sticks were a mystery. They thought super balls were candy. And many of them needed demonstrations on how to use a yo-yo. 

We all enjoyed the challenge and working together. It was a tiring week but left me feeling blessed to have had the opportunity to speak into these young lives. We had 120 to 150 children every day. I don't think any of us expected quite that many. If we would have had more people, we could have done something for the younger children and the older children. As it was we set an age limit of 6 to 12 and did our best to take all of those that came. We hope to do it again, in other villages and in Atonkwa.