Tuesday, August 19, 2008

When VBS is lame...

Last week was VBS week. I've never seen one quite like this. They have a lesson for the adults too. Is that common where you're from? I've never been to a VBS that did beyond 6th or maybe 8th grade.
Let me tell you that the adult material from this highly respected company was hands down the worst lesson material I've ever seen! It was written at a high school level (yes, it was the adult curriculum, I checked) and the author told little stories of her trips down memory lane and would occasionally thrown in a question like, "what memories does this story invoke for you?" She even had activities (for adults!) like soaking cotton balls in different liquids like alcohol, ammonia, coffee, etc., and putting them in film canisters and asking people to sniff and see what memories were evoked.
So the poor Episcopal rector and I were pretty much stuck making things up as we went along. IT went ok, but I don't think it was as good as it could have been with better curriculum to point us in the right direction.
I was also pretty disappointed in the music for the kids. I've heard some pretty good VBS music in my day, this was not one of those years. This really surprises me since, like I said, this is a well know company who's been putting out VBS material for years.
Since we work VBS out with two other churches in our town, I'm not in on picking the curriculum, but for next year, I'm going to encourage our representative to look a little deeper into the material rather than picking it because the theme was cute.
Here's hoping.

2 comments:

seethroughfaith said...

whose curriculum /programme was it? sounds awful :(

Rivkah said...

That's the crazy thing... It was Cokesbury! They usually have great stuff. I'm hoping what the kids did was far better than what the adults got.