The Great Barrier Reef

For my Great Barrier Reef, I made this coral piece. I plan on covering the TV and TV stand in my room with a dark blue tablecloth, putting this in front of the set, and then attaching paper fish to the table cloth so it looks like they're swimming!

To make this, I first started off with plastic sound tubes like this:

I found that the kind that stretches out works much better than the sound tubes you swing in a circle because they are bendable and easy to work with. I found mine at FiveBelow. They were $1 each and I found them on the very bottom level of the bins near the register. 

The first thing I did was stretch out the tube, and then I cut them to different sizes. I worked with one tube at a time that way I didn't mess up all of them at once by cutting pieces too short. For the blue and green coral pieces, I cut one longer piece at the hot glued the shorter pieces to that.

Not all coral is the same, so don't be afraid to bend the pieces and cut them all different lengths!

For the orange and yellow coral pieces, I cut the tube into pieces and then glued each of them to a sturdy cardboard base. These pieces of coral didn't look full enough to me, so I also coiled colored pipe cleaners around a pencil and glued them in between the pieces to make it a little more exciting. 

After that, I took all of my coral pieces and hot glued them onto a piece of cardboard. The last thing I did was add a few more springy pipe cleaners to tie all the pieces together. Ta-da!

VBS 2012!

This year for VBS, my church is using Lifeway's Amazing Wonders Aviation curriculum and I will be teaching the 3rd-4th grade class. VBS for me is June 18th-22nd, so I'm almost ready to decorate my room and teach the week away! I can't wait to blog about my ideas, decorations, and experiences throughout the week! A few of my ideas are inspired by things I saw on Pinterest, and others are just from past experience that I've had teaching VBS.

Before I start posting about specific decorations, I want to explain the "vision" that I have for my room. When it comes to decorating my room, I always want an awesome room, and it never goes the way I plan. This year, that is not going to happen. I hope. Anyways... I want to take the six landmarks represented in the theme and model a section of my room after each of them. That means that I will have a Paricutin Volcano, the Matterhorn, the Great Barrier Reef, Victoria Falls, the Grand Canyon, and the Northern Lights in my room when I'm finished. It sounds like a lot, but I'm hoping it won't be so bad since each section can only be so big-- I think it would be a lot more complicated to make the entire room one thing.

I will blog about specific decorations that I have made, and then I will do a blog with pictures of my room  after I decorate. I also plan on blogging about the activities I altered, and some of the things I plan on doing so that my class will run as smoothly as possible!

I am looking forward to awesome week of VBS!