Three Ways to Use Gadget Making in Your VBS
One of the very best parts of this year’s VBS Previews for me was getting to watch people exercise their creative juices on gadget making in the Creative Zone.
Don’t worry if you missed it, because we have pictures and ideas galore for you! Take a look at some of the finished products on our Facebook page.
It started as a way to help you brainstorm easy ways to decorate. We realized that some might be intimidated by the “high tech” features of Agency D3, so we set out to create gadgets from every day items that would be easy to make. It was so much fun, we thought you might like to try too!
We visited a local Goodwill Outlet, which allows you to buy by the pound, and loaded up several carts with what most people would call junk.
But one man’s junk is another’s gadget, right?
For those who signed up to do the the activity at the Creative Zone, they each received a box with four to five items that were just theirs and a free table available to everyone that was full of bottle caps, wires, craft sticks, stickers, hot glue guns, buttons, screws, hardware, and any other small recyclable junk people donated to our cause.
The mission: create a unique gadget with your items.
The result: some of the most creative craft/decoration items I’ve ever seen, from the Truth Detector Hat that sat on your head and let people know whether you were telling the truth to an analyzer that took in your DNA and put up results on the screen to tell you the truth about yourself. And sometimes the people who protested the hardest that they weren’t creative made the best gadgets of all!
What could you create? Where would you get the items? We heard a lot of ideas, from cleaning out garages, nursery closets, and church resource rooms, to doing a church wide drive for bottle caps, keyboards, screens, old broken toys, and broken kitchen items that seem gadgety.
People suggested all types of different ways they plan to use this activity:
1. Letting volunteers compete to make the best gadget at a training or planning session.
2. Having a preteen or student fun night before VBS and letting their older kids or teens create gadgets to decorate the church, helping them be more invested in VBS since they helped decorate.
3. Making the gadget process a three day or week long craft that kids add to a bit each day during crafts to keep them coming back.
How could you use it to inspire kids or volunteers, or just have some fun with your own family? Let us know in the comments!
So if you are attaching things together is hot glue all you are using to hold them? Just curious to know how else all these parts are going together. I love this idea and may use it with our youth group to make gadgets!
Tracy,
We provided duct tape, hot glue (though you’d want that to be cool melt with kids and even teens), chenille stems, wires, and various kinds of string and fishing twine. Any of these would work and probably more that you can think of. The hot glue did the most solid job though! I hope you do use it! Send us some pictures on Facebook if you do!
We would love to see some pictures of the VBS events at Nashville etc. Please send a link or post them on fb so all of us can see them.
They are posted in the gadget album on our Facebook page. Thanks!
Can you tell me the idea behind this creative making of things. Does it go with a craft rotation?
For the first time ever I am lost with this whole idea. I haven’t ordered the material because I just
don’t see the idea behind it – not the scriptures, that I understand, and that is good.
Hi Nancy, Gadget-making can be part of your craft rotation if you’d like. It would probably need to be a three day or week long craft. It can also be a fun volunteer activity during a training session and then the gadgets made can be used as decorations. You could even build it in to your VBS celebration and let families create gadgets together. It’s really up to you. For us, it has been a fun exercise that shows you can make great props for very little cost.