Winter Blast! Part 1

     Our church recently decided to have a Sunday school rally day to boost attendance. We saw this as an opportunity to create a great event that kids would be excited to bring their friends to. We decided to call it Winter Blast and "say goodbye to winter" with a winter-themed event (our church is in Florida so this seemed really unique to us - half of our kids have never seen snow.) We surfed the web for some winter "Olympic" games and ordered medals and ribbons from Oriental Trading Co. We booked an inflatable obstacle course and planned some exciting team competitions to be played outside. We made flyers and  postcards to send to kids who hadn't come in a while. Then we went up to the church the day before to decorate and set up...




 Scissors (a.k.a. Caitlin) cut white plastic tablecloths into the shape of icicles and hung them on everything she could reach. Look for them in later pictures.

     Paper snowflakes - a must! Rock (a.k.a. Jessica) was determined to cut out as many as she could. On the right, Director Kay (in the yellow) discusses the prize table with one of our teachers. (They decided we needed more.)

We borrow our unofficial motto from Mythbusters: "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing." Believe it or not, you can overdo it with out breaking the bank.

Here is our Winter Blast finished product...

We invited the youth praise band to play, so we decked out the stage with icicles, snowflake streamers, snowflakes hung with fishing line, and poly-fil snow. We were unsure about the balloons on the ceiling at first, but once we got some more up there, it had the effect of wintery clouds. You can't see it in this picture, but we borrowed some cut-outs of winter scenes from our daycare and put them on the walls with some more snowflakes.

We frosted the hallway a bit to keep the theme going. It also brings parents into the world your trying to create for the kids.

We decorated our check-in table and organized it with the expectation of accommodating visiting families.

     It may seem like a lot for a one day event; but this was about outreach and was well worth overdoing. as far as decorating, the helium balloons were our greatest expense. Everything else was paper, poly-fil, and plastic tablecloths. In "Part 2," I'll tell you more about the games, how we tied in the Bible, and what we did when bad weather started threatening event day. Everyone's favorite questioin: Will we have to cancel the blow-up?!?