4 Things I Appreciated About Group’s SCUBA VBS

We just finished a week of VBS at our church. By every metric, it was a huge success. For several reasons, we opted to use Group’s SCUBA curriculum this year. While this curriculum certainly isn’t perfect, there were four things I appreciated about it, as both a pastor and a parent:

• Group’s suggestion to utilize mixed-aged crews. As a Montessori family, I’m familiar with the rationale behind this and have seen it work effectively in the lives of my own children. Mixed-aged groups give younger children the opportunity to lead. Older kids take responsibility for young kids. Mastery happens when older children explain tricky concepts to younger ones. They cut down on discipline issues. They also facilitate connections across grades, which can be particularly helpful in smaller environments. All these things happened at VBS thanks to our mixed aged crews. We heard again and again how much less chaotic VBS felt this year as well as how good it was to see children get to know one another.
• The cohesiveness of each day. Leaders, parents, and kids all loved that there was one Bible point each day (Note: I didn’t love what all the Bible points actually were.) No matter what you were doing, you heard the Bible point…And because you heard it everywhere, kids left knowing that Bible point. 
• The Bible buddies. There’s a part of me that HATES how gimmicky this is…But I cannot deny that kids LOVED the Bible buddies. Every day, children came into the closing session, eager to show me their Bible buddy from the day. My own kids went home each day and carefully put their Bible buddy in a special place. We heard lots of stories about how children used these physical buddies to explain the story of the day to their grown-ups after they returned home. 
• The Gospel of John’s. My children’s ministry director and I went back and forth a dozen times regarding whether or not it was worth spending money on the Gospel of John’s for Sticky Scripture. Eventually, we decided to purchase them. I’m so glad we did. During their week in VBS, children got to practice looking up things in the Bible and then they marked the various passages. Because this was just one book, finding passages was much less intimidating for our littles. Because the Scripture passages were marked when kids got home, kids actually showed those passages to their grown-ups (a win at every level!) Parents have told me that their kids are continuing to read John on their own now and I’ve seen that in my own house.