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Cokesbury has announced their VBS theme for 2011. It’s titled, “Cokesbury – Shake It Up Café: Where Kids Carry Out God’s Recipe.” In each of the five days, kids will explore a different Biblical festival and discover the principles for living according to God’s plan. The graphics on the website play off a cooking theme with large chef’s hats, aprons, pots & pans, and tablecloths.
Theme Impression
I’m a big fan of the food network and my own children enjoy some of their shows too. I think this could be a really fun theme. I love the originality and variety of creative directions it could take. My imagination jumped back to the 2007 Disney film Ratatouille which introduced the world of fine cooking to this generation.
Michael from Cokesbury sent me one clarification about the theme. Some have mistaken that the whole think happens in the church kitchen. The truth is that this VBS does not involved the kids being in the kitchen at all – the cafe and kitchen are just the setting (the same as kids are not really riding pandas in Group’s PandaMonium). The Shake It Up Café VBS will feature all the standard VBS fun: recreation, crafts, music, assembly time, mission.
More Information
Our website will have a full review of this Vacation Bible School curriculum sometime this winter. You can get more information from Cokesbury’s official website, Facebook page, or Twitter account. They have bible content overview and music samples.
Related posts:
- LifeWay 2011 VBS Theme Announced: Big Apple Adventure
- Group VBS 2011 Theme Announced: PandaMania
- 2010 Cokesbury VBS: Going Green VBS Theme
- Inside Cokesbury VBS: An Interview With Michael Aulisio
- Galactic Blast VBS from Cokesbury for 2010
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This is the best VBS our church has ever done. The music was great the kids loved it. I know that i still have all those songs stuck in my head. The snacks were very good too they really loved the smoothies yum! The bible lessons even I learned things from. Discovery time was cool too we learned some pretty neat things from it. The games were fun the kids loved the games and really got involved! The crafts were really cute. I lead the 3rd and 4th grade students along with being the director of VBS and there favorite time was going to crafts. We had about 25 kids attend our VBS this year . At the closing ceremony the kids got up in front of there families and sang and danced to the songs for them. Even the teachers got evolved in the dancing. Our favorite song was everybody celebrate. I did not hear one compliant from any one evolved in this VBS we had so much fun “SHAKING THINGS UP” :)
Our VBS included about 30 children from age 3 through 5th grade (mostly 3year olds & early elementary) plus 6 teenagers who helped. They loved the Shake It Up Cafe, especially the science experiments, and how they connected to the stories. Our staff’s complaint was that the music was too difficult for the younger children. The tunes were fine. The words were great, but it was too much for the little ones to learn. Young children need repetition. They were able to manage some of the choruses. Before VBS started most of our children had a CD, which they loved listening to it. Thanks for a great VBS.
I am writing on behalf of the Perry Ministerial Alliance. We used the Shake It Up Cafe this year. We liked it very much, but did have some problems with the music. We found the songs difficult to sing without the accompanying CD — too long, too “produced”. None readers and early readers could not follow them and the motions were too complicated to learn in the allotted time frame. They were nice to listen to, but were not something the children would have to “take home with them.” The cost prohibited obtaining copies for each family to have to take home. We do not mind learning new music, but it needs to be easily singable and easily learned for all age groups. This has been an issue with the music for the past several years and we wanted to bring this to your attention as it was the consensus of the group.
I agree with Joy – as the Bible storyteller, this theme was a real dispointment. In fact, I found this blog because I am looking for alternative ideas to keep the kids engaged for the Pentacost/Festival of Weeks lesson tomorrow. The explanation of the ways that the Israelites celebrated the various festivals is not very engaging and the ways they relate to the themes for each day seem to be a stretch (I do think the Bible Bytes and verses are good messages). Our VBS has about 65 kids this year, but 45 of them are between 4 and 6 years old. That means that of the 4 groups that visit me each day, only 2 can do the reading-related activities suggested in the book so I am left to devise my own activities for the other 2 groups. In case other have a similar problem, here are some things I did: The game I came up with for the second day was “Ram, Ram, Bull” (like Duck, Duck, Goose). For today’s passover meal session I did a memory game that involved showing them the tray of passover foods and then covering it up while taking one of the items away then seeing if the child could guess which was missing. This proved to be very popular and they learned the elements of meal quite well. They also liked the haroseth I made for the lesson so those were high points! I think for tomorrow, the last day, I will play “parachute” style games (loosely related to the “holy wind” theme) suggested in another page on this site for a Pentacost party after the Bible story is told.
My good-sized Episcopal church decided to use this curriculum and I, as the storyteller, was disappointed with it. First, and this goes with practically every pre-packaged VBS, the music is nothing any mainline church actually uses on a Sunday morning. There are plenty of hymns -especially in approved supplemental resources- that are appropriate for young people and which they would then use again in church. Instead it’s all about “me and Jesus” in the lyrics and excitement in the music. Second, I though the content was very loosely connected. It’s as if the writers chose something they wanted to say about God and then dug around and found a scripture piece here or there that sort of connected to the main point. I had to take a lot of license in my storytelling to come up with things that were cohesive.
Shake it Up Cafe has been a blast for our children this summer. We are using the VBS for our Wednesday evening children’s time during the summer. The children enjoy making their own snacks and being a “chef” each night.
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