I’ve downloaded and printed my Easter zines now what?
When I first receive my new StoryMakers adventure, I giggle and sometimes cry through each page. These stories are not just for kids! We adults can gain loads of insight from them, too! Okay, now that we’ve laughed and cried, let’s download our images and upload them to Canva to make weekly graphics you can use to promote your Children’s programming on social media, bulletin boards, parish screens, or your weekly newsletter. If you are not utilizing these downloads, start now! They lift your ministry in 20 seconds flat. Not only do they help you share with your parish what’s going on with the kids (which, let’s face it, not many folks outside of the parents and kids know), but they also make you look super-profesh with their gorgeous graphics. I realize this takes a little more time, but it’s worth it.
Now that you’ve got your promo graphics, schedule them out. You can easily do this on social media using the scheduling tools provided on Instagram and Facebook.
Now with your graphics out of the way, you can focus on your weekly plans! I like to use Google sheets to plan my programming, which I can then share with my leadership team. This is an awesome opportunity to add your own creativity to your ministry time! As you are planning your week, let the Holy Spirit guide you, and if there is a little something extra (special snack that goes with the week's theme, craft, fun video), throw it into your schedule. Now if you’re looking to make it as simple as possible, I get it. I’ve been in those seasons, too. But this is meant to be fun and creative. I wonder what the Spirit might lead you to?
The Easter maps are so adorable that I want to put them up everywhere! This season, I plan on printing each of them weekly and adding them to a bulletin board so we have an every-week reminder of where we’ve been and where we are going. I’ll do this by printing full color images of each map, then adding them to our white board with double stick tape each week to track our journey.
So we’ve made graphics and lesson plans and shared those plans with our team–let’s get our tools ready! For the Easter download, you will want to make sure you’ve got lots of crafty tools ready to go.
Encourage your children to get creative and try new things! Not everyone likes to color in the lines or draw recognizable shapes, so this is a great time to encourage new forms of creative expression! Lead the way with your own zine at this time.
You’re ready for class! Enjoy the adventure.
Here’s a list of tools I keep on hand:
- markers,
- colored pencils,
- crayons,
- oil pastels,
- glue sticks,
- magazines for collages,
- tissue paper,
- construction paper,
- washi tape,
- popsicle sticks,
- scissors.
