Decorating For VBS | Sonrise National Park

We had a blast decorating for Vacation Bible School this year!

One of the cool things about the decorations is that they cost us next to nothing.  Most of this stuff was all either already at the church or things we owned.

Like I said, we used Gospel Light’s Sonrise National Park curriculum.  The nice part about using an old curriculum (I think it came out in 2012) is that there were a ton of cute ideas on Pinterest!  I created a board and put all of my ideas there.

So let me start with the sunrise … all Jon.  Well … Jon and the Holy Spirit.  It was something that he found in his church, remembered he had, thought would be too big, but let me borrow it anyway.  It fit our space perfectly!  I’m not sure what we would have filled the back wall with if we didn’t have it.

(Thank you to my sweet husband for hanging it!)

The big tent and the easy up tent (in the right corner of the photo) were donated by a church member.  We had tables under the easy up with easy crafts that the kids did first thing in the morning when everyone was being dropped off.

Smokey was donated by the same church member – I have no idea where she got him!

The waterfall was definitely a pinterest idea!  Jon and I went to the $1.99 Fabric Store in Auburn and I bought 5 yards of the darker blue fabric and 15 yards of the shimmery blue fabric.  I hung both reams of fabric from the rafters and then created the “waves” by gathering and pulling up pieces of the shimmery fabric.  I gathered a lot of the shimmery fabric at the bottom of the waterfall and then spread it out.

We covered tables that we had on hand (some that were leftover from the yard sale!) and covered them in burlap that we had on hand.  It was a good use of space, looked like boulders and allowed us to hide the stuff we didn’t have room to store.

The kayak is mine – I figured I wouldn’t be kayaking much that week and my husband brought it over (and when he loaded it up at the end of the week we took it straight to the water!).

The plants were leftover from the yard sale.  They were in a pile that was going to be donated, so we decided to grab them and use them for the time being.

The smaller tent is Bruce’s.  We originally had the big tent up there but it was too big for the space.  Everyone told me it would be, buuuuuuut … yeah.  Camping really isn’t my thing.  I have no idea how big a nine-person tent actually is.  The two-person worked much better.

These are artificial Christmas trees that we use for our Christmas Bazaar.  I’m thankful they were easily accessible!

The bucket to the left is our prize bucket (kids got prizes for different things).  You probably recognize the bucket from some of my altarscapes!

We had such a blast decorating this year!  The only thing we spent money on was the waterfall fabric and I am going to expense it with my account, not the church school account because I am going to be able to use it in so many different ways for worship.

What fun ways have you decorated for VBS?  I love themed programs.