With “Fresh Veggies Day” having just come and gone, we got to thinking about different gardening techniques.  ReNew Seed Packs provide you with tomato, basil, onion, oregano, and pepper seeds to grow your own pizza garden.  With so many churches tight on space, we started brainstorming a list of creative ways for your VBS kids grow their very own garden this summer.

The first idea involves upcycling (which we love!).  Do you have leftover 2-liter soda bottles or gallon milk jugs sitting around your church? Our guess is yes.  Well, an upside down planter is a great space-saving way to re-purpose those beverage containers.   The supplies are pretty basic: you’ll need some dirt, seeds, scissors, string, and empty bottles!  Kids can bring their planters home, or you could find a space at church to create an upside down garden!

How about a DIY vertical garden with room for all your herbs and veggies?  Ask members of your congregation to donate their old shoe organizers (odds are they’re already dirty, which is perfect because they’re going to be filled with dirt!).  Plant them now and each kid can write their name on a shoe slot. Watch the growth over the summer and mark the progress.

Last, but not least, thedailygreen.com found some strange and exciting ways that people have created urban, on-the-go gardens.  Around the world, a recent trend of mobile gardening has been popping up in everything from shopping carts to truck beds.  Does your church have any found objects that could be transformed into plant containers?  Look around, there’s probably something inventive that you’ve never even thought of before!

image sources: re-nest.com, greenupgrader.com, thedailygreen.com

Yesterday, we were very excited to see a blog post from First United Methodist Church in Morris, Oklahoma, discussing their plans for ReNew this summer.  Does your church have a blog?  Have you been posting about your plans for ReNew?  We’d love to hear more.

Leave a commnet for us here, or share a link to your blog on ReNew’s Facebook page!

Many of you have shared details about your ReNew kick-off events. From picnics to farm stands, and recycling committees to Earth Day celebrations, all of them sound exciting and unique. Now we’d like to SEE those events in action!

Upload your pictures or video footage to the ‘Fan photos’/'Fan video’ section of ReNew’s Facebook page (on the left hand column under photos and video).  Has your church been crafting like crazy, planting trees and terrariums, or growing tomatoes?  How about this:  have you begun growing a pizza garden with your ReNew seed packs?  Share your images, and everyone can vote on their favorites.

We can’t wait to see what you’ve been up to!

image source: freefarmstand.org

Mother’s Day is just around the corner, which got us thinking about green gift ideas that recycle everyday objects.  Design*Sponge, a great blog for DIY crafts, suggests creating terrariums made from old glass jars and moss from the sidewalk – the perfect Sunday school activity!  Kids get to play around in the dirt and turn an old pickle jar (or baby food jar, or jam jar – the options are endless!) into their own green space.  Even better, they can give it as a gift and add a little bit of the outdoors to their home!

Another fun craft idea involves old aluminum cans.  Tenth Muse Studio provides step-by-step instructions on how to create fun, re-purposed tin can flowers.  Turn this piece of “pop” art into a window garden or magnet, and add some color to a room.  This craft takes a little more time, but is a great way to teach kids about reusing objects that could easily be viewed as garbage.

How about some recycled tin can flower vases?  Design*Sponge also has an easy project that reuses anything from tomato cans to coffee tins to create a vase for plastic foliage, flowers from your garden, or containers to hold forks, knives, and spoons.  Give kids old sequins, buttons, or ribbon and tell them to decorate the cans in fun and exciting ways.

What are some ‘green’ crafts you have done with your kids, Sunday school students, or friends?

image source: designspongeonline.com

Today is a very special green holiday…it’s Arbor Day!  It has been over 135 years since Arbor Day was first founded, and it is still celebrated all over the country with simple, environmentally friendly actions like planting trees and nurturing the land.  It is also the perfect time to teach kids how care for God’s earth!  The Arbor Day Foundation has provided some great celebration ideas.  Use these to plan a special Arbor Day Sunday school program, or to teach your kids or students more about the community you live in!

Celebration Ideas

• Get kids into action. Ask a civic or service group in your community to promote an aluminum can drive. Use the proceeds to buy a tree to plant at your church or other public place.
• Fill the air with music. Have an Arbor Day concert with songs about trees, or with tree names in their titles.
• Sponsor a tree trivia contest with your Sunday school students. Give away trees to winners.
• Conduct a tree search. Ask kids to find large, unusual, or historic trees in your community. Once the results are in, publish a map that highlights trees the kids found, or hold a walk for members of your church, showcasing the historic trees.
• Take your students or members of your congregation a hike — a tree identification hike — and have girl scouts or boy scouts from your church act as guides.  Bring a tree identification book and see how many people can name trees correctly!
• Dedicate a forest, or a tree, or a flower bed in a park, and make it an occasion to talk about stewardship. Get a local nursery or garden center to hold an open house or field day.
• Encourage your church to hold an Arbor Day party  and ask members to adopt and care for street trees in front of their homes. Pass out buttons. Give away trees.

Happy Arbor Day!

For some, it is an annual tradition to do a thorough cleaning each spring. If you plan to clean out the closets and sweep under the furniture this year, please read on to learn how you can do so while also caring for God’s creation.

As always, consider donating, reusing or recycling unwanted items. Get creative with those leftover household items, or turn to the Internet for tips on reusing instead of discarding things. Here are a few suggestions from Purdue University:

• Chipped Coffee Mugs – Reuse as small windowsill-size planters.
• Old Greeting Cards – Donate to your Sunday school, daycare center, or VBS program for craft projects.
• Utensils – Use old kitchen utensils in your picnic basket, or in the garden.

When it comes to actually cleaning the house, we’ve summarized five of the more green cleaning strategies from Seventh Generation, a company that sells responsible cleaning products:

1. Open your windows and let the fresh air in to detoxify your home from the dirt and dust that has been trapped over the winter.

2. Place welcome mats around doors to help remove particles and pollutants carried inside on shoes ― one of the key ways toxins enter our homes.

3. Clean with microfiber cloths to remove household soils and dust better than rags and disposable options.

4. Use natural-formula cleaners made with biodegradable plant-derived products and  non-toxic minerals that won’t leave chemical residues around the house or pollute indoor air

5. Wash laundry in cold water and hang it out to dry to save a considerable amount of energy.

Another winter has come and gone; will you participate in spring-cleaning this year?

image source: ourkidsnews.com

ReNew: The Green VBS has a presence on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Are you following us?

Twitter

You can find us and follow us @ReNewGreenVBS (RSS feed of updates).  You are able to follow our ReNew Blog posts in addition to retweets of great content about how kids can grow in faith, have fun and change the world.

You can use the Twitter website or various applications to monitor posts from @ReNewGreenVBS and anyone else you choose to “follow.” Here are a few of our favorite Twitter feeds to follow so far:

http://twitter.com/charitywater

http://twitter.com/doitgreenmn

http://twitter.com/OneDaysWages

http://twitter.com/the_daily_green

http://twitter.com/wearesparkhouse

The reception has been warm. We have over 100 followers. Many have extended warm welcomes to ReNew on Twitter, like Erik Ullestad who wrote a blog post about ReNew (what he calls the VBS That Keeps On Giving) and tweeted it. Thanks Erik!

You can also search Twitter to see what’s happening – right now – about children’s ministry, creation care, green VBS, or sparkhouse. If you are not signed up already, start at the Twitter home page.

Facebook

Our ReNew (the Green VBS™) Facebook fan page has been a great place to bring together a community, too! Almost 700 of you are following our updates and thoroughly engaging in the conversations. Thanks for all your great comments on recent topics like community gardens, the ReNew Starter Kit and Kid Packs, and our decorating videos!

We’d love to connect with you on other social media platforms, as well, like Ning or YouTube.

What social media tools do you find most relevant to you and your church?

Just announced… ReNew: The Green VBS kid packs will be available for under $4 each!

As you may know, our goal is to encourage children to grow in faith, have fun, and change the world. Recently, though, we’ve heard from a few congregations that purchased the ReNew starter kit. They found the kid packs to be out of their price range. To ensure the ReNew curriculum is implemented as designed, by using the coordinating kid packs, we are dropping the price of the preschool, lower elementary, and upper elementary kid packs!

With a drastic decrease in price from $12.99 to $3.90 each, we hope more churches and youth ministers will find it even more accessible to bring together the Bible and environmental stewardship in children’s programming.

Thank you to everyone who has shared his or her feedback on our all-new green VBS thus far – it has proven very helpful!

Are you curious to find out more about ReNew and how it can help your congregation? Share your comments below or sign up for more information.

Earlier this month, we sat down with Lori Cotter of Sugarloaf United Methodist Church in Duluth, Georgia. She so graciously shared her perspective on ReNew: The Green VBS, that she recently purchased for this year’s VBS week, and how her congregation works to be good stewards of God’s creation.

ReNew: What is life like as the Director of Children’s Ministry at Sugarloaf United Methodist Church in Duluth, Georgia?

Lori: What can I say? Being the Children’s Ministry Director at Sugarloaf is the best job I’ve ever had! Sugarloaf’s goal is to be relevant, and I can do all kinds of things to reach kids. For example, we’re in our fifth year of rotation model Sunday School where we get to teach children in a variety of way.  We call the program BLASt (Bible Learning Adventure Stations).

Amidst other VBS programs out there, what attracted you to ReNew?

We stepped a little bit out of our comfort zone to choose ReNew. Traditionally, we have gone with another publisher with programs that worked but had become routine. Sugarloaf Kids Ministry wanted to use something that had applications to today and the ReNew program really shows that one child can have an impact. I think it is so relevant to what is happening in the world today.

When do you plan to implement ReNew?

In our church, we call vacation bible school our Sugarloaf Kids Summer Sensational because, really, who wants to go to school in the summer? Our program will take place June 14-18, 2010, and it culminates on Children’s Celebration Sunday. We will conduct it over five morning sessions that will last 3.5 hours each. Each day has a unique focus.

• Day 1: Planting Seeds (“A sower went out to sow…”) – God’s love is a seed in me.
• Day 2: Taking Root (Path & Birds) – God’s love takes root in me.
• Day 3: Growing (Rocky Ground) – God’s love is growing in me.
• Day 4: Facing Challenges (Thorns) – The love of Jesus helps me face challenges.
• Day 5: Living Together (Good Soil) – We live together in God’s love.

Of all the activities and resources associated with your “Summer Sensational,” what do you look forward to the most?

I love the whole idea of going to worship sites. The “self” site is really showing kids that they can make a difference, the “community” site shows kids how to help their immediate environment, and the “world” site shows the young, even though they are so little, they can have a big impact on the world.

Also, I love the idea of using the same story – Jesus’ Parable of the Sower – over the duration of the program by highlighting a different portion each day. The activities are relevant and applicable to today, showing children what God expects us to do with the Earth.

How will you be putting your own spin on ReNew? What sort of thoughts and ideas do you have?

We’re going to take each area and the ideas from ReNew and write our lesson plans to work for us. We’ll put our own spin on the “self” site with crafts and for the “world” site with a mission spin and a project offering for the Navajo reservation in New Mexico our church supports. We’ll ask children to fill bags with toys and school supplies and we’ll share them with the kids at Pueblo Pintado.  And, the program will serve dual purposes. We will reuse all the supplies during our mission trip to the reservation in July.

Also, with over 600 kids, we have too many children to walk outside, as suggested in the programming, so we will be showing a video about the earth in our World Center and with the lesson that will compliment each other. I’m also looking forward to incorporating our on-site garden called God’s Garden into our ReNew Summer Sensational.

What other activities does your congregation do to be good “green” stewards of the Earth?

We recycle! There are bins in every department and for the week of our summer program we will set out compost bins. Also, we will provide reusable water bottles for the children during the Summer Sensational. They can reuse them during the program at our “water holes” and at home.

This year’s program will be “paperless.”  We will be going electronic.  From registration forms to our daily newsletter, we will utilize our website to do everything online.

Are you doing anything special for Earth Day this year?

We will do something; we just don’t know what yet. It will probably happen during the whole month of April because this year is Earth Year. Also, we will have an “Impact Wall” during April. Our congregation will have an opportunity to make a financial donation to our summer program to sponsor a child, children or a family.

Finally, why is it so important to teach today’s youth about taking care of the Earth?

I think it is important because you can go to the Bible and see that we’re supposed to be doing. I think we’re at a point where we’ve almost taken advantage of the Earth so now is really the time to recognize that it is here for a long time and we should start making a difference. I believe God made the Earth for us and we have to take care of it.

We’d like to thank Lori for taking the time to talk with us about why Sugarloaf purchased the ReNew Starter Kit and how they plan on using it. We’re so excited to hear they will be reusing the supplies and making ReNew their own; keep us posted on how the ReNew-infused Summer Sensational goes!

With the 40th anniversary of Earth Day around the corner (April 22nd) we are reminded that our concern for environmental sustainability is not some new fad. As people of faith, we are called to be good stewards of God’s creation and make each and every day Earth Day.

Clearly, there is a lot we can do together to care for our planet, but what can you and members of your congregation do to make a difference? ReNew has come up with 10 easy tips to infuse green activities into your every day lives.

1. Walk, bike or use public transportation. If you must drive, combine trips and carpool when possible.
2. Change you incandescent light bulbs to compact florescent. Don’t throw them in the trash, however. They contain mercury and must be disposed of properly.
3. Plant trees or other plants.
4. Use refillable bottles for water. Reusable, aluminum bottles are available everywhere.
5. Pay your bills online. Doing this will save paper, fossil fuels and not to mention 44 cents on postage!
6. Use reusable grocery bags. To help you remember, leave them in your car if you must drive.
7. Cool down with fans and light clothing instead of cranking the air conditioning.
8. Eat local foods and freeze seasonal fruits for the winter months.
9. Unplug your devices when not in use. This includes unplugging cell phones when charged, DVD players, CD players and anything that drains small amounts of energy when idle. It all adds up!
10. Install a low-flow shower head to save water.

Have we missed anything? Let us know how you take care of the Earth.