Back To (Vacation Bible) School: Part III

Well, today has been the day I was most excited and anxious about this week as far as the set was concerned. Can I just say it was totally awesome? No really. It was cool. And, you had to have been there because the pictures just don't do it justice. But I will do my best to describe it to you.

The story was about Peter walking on the water to Jesus (Matthew 14:22-33), so our setting was in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. And how do you construct a boat without constructing a boat? Paper, of course!

We lined chairs up in the shape of a boat. I painted miles of brown paper to look like wood (Which, by the way, doesn't show up hardly at all in a dark room. LOL!) and covered the chairs with it. Then we used blue paper and thin plastic tarps to create the flowing water look around the boat and out across the floor. We used a borrowed smoke machine to fill the room with a mysterious fog. We hung a glow-in-the-dark moon from the ceiling with fishing line and had a black cloud cover it at just the right moment when the storm began (with more fishing line and Sara behind the scenes).

The children enter the dark room. The water looks somewhat like this (only less blurry):The fog around them is glowing from the dim blue lights above. They hear the sounds of waves as they file straight into the boat. The city on the coast (from days 1 and 2) is barely visible to the left. As Logan begins describing the story (Jesus Give Us the Power to be Brave), she has the children pretend to hoist sails, row oars, and rock with the boat. The storm begins with a crash of thunder and flashes of lightning over the city--courtesy of Paul behind the scenes in the sound booth. We mist the kids with spray bottles and "Jesus" appears as a tiny light coming from the direction of the "shore."

The storm is calmed...we've saved the best for last....walking on water!

What?

You heard me right. The children got to step out of the front of the boat and walk across "water." Amy explains to them that if they walk quickly, they will be able to step across easily. But if they are hesitant and slow, they will sink. The children don't realize that what we have in the plastic underbed bin is actually a Non-Newtonian Fluid made from cornstarch and water. This is some crazy stuff! If you've never tried it, go in the kitchen and make some. You just dump cornstarch in a bowl and add some water until it is completely mixed. You'll know when you have the right consistency because it'll drip through your fingers like water, but when you poke it, it will feel hard like a solid! Check out how Mythbusters does it.

Here's Amy standing in it at the end of the day after the kids and some of the fog had cleared.

It had begun to harden, and she wasn't sinking very much. Still, you couldn't have paid me to put my feet in there after all those funky little feet had passed through it. (Shudder...)

Logan thought it would be funny to take a picture of Amy and me trying to dump the cornstarch into the woods. Our book told us specifically not to pour this giant batch down a drain (go figure!) so we had to do something with it. By the time we had gotten around to dumping it, however, it was late afternoon and the stuff and become quite firm. Chunks were flying everywhere as we dug it out with sticks, but it was rather creepy to watch the stiff chunks settle into the ground as puddles like some alien movie monster.

But, Jesus gave me the power to be brave, and I was able to get through it. :)