As I mentioned last week, we recently finished attending a fabulous week of Vacation Bible School at a local church. Running six full nights, not counting months of prep work and home visits afterwards, this church puts forth serious effort into their VBS - and it shows. It is the by far the best VBS I've seen in years.
Our whole family attends - they even have classes for us adults! By the end of the week, we're all exhausted - and we figure the teachers and other VBS workers must be even more tired than us. After all, many of them work all day and then volunteer their evenings to help out. We decided that we must thank those people working so hard to give us a good VBS experience - but how?
After talking to the kids, we settled on cookie bars. We used a basic Hershey cookie bar recipe and then wrapped them individually in colored plastic wrap.
To make the cards, I cut copy paper in squares and pulled out all of our rubber stamps and ink pads. The kids used 'thank you' stamps on the front and either wrote or stamped their names on the back.
After the ink had dried, we punched holes in the corner and threaded curling ribbon through the hole. Then we used the ribbon to tie each little 'bag' closed. We packed them in a market basket and took them to VBS.
We arrived a few minutes early and we traveled around together as the kids passed out their cookies. They were excited to tell their teachers 'thank you, ' and the VBS workers seemed to appreciate that someone noticed their efforts.
Our cookie bars in no way made up for all the hard work that the volunteers put forth, but we think it's important to teach our children to thank those who help us. By being involved in the baking and card creating, they felt ownership of their project - and they were extra happy to hand them out.
How do you teach your children to express their gratitude?
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