Vacation Bible School - Using a Point System

Hello again! If you are dropping in this week we are talking about a great way to use a point system and keep track of it throughout the week of your Vacation Bible School program. 

I can tell you that every day of every VBS program we have held, the day's activities begin with a registration time. We set up two tables labeled for each age group - one for the younger children (ages up to 8) and one for the older children (ages 9 and up). This 30-45 minutes is the time when as the children arrive they can report to the registration tables, giving us their name, worksheet from the previous day, quote their Bible verse, and report/register any visitors they invited and brought with them for that day. 

One of the first things to consider is how YOU will keep track of attendance and  of how many points each child earns throughout the week. 

Here is a basic chart that I designed to fit our VBS point system. It is basic but it works for me! One added advantage that I had was obtaining a list of students from the local school so that I could enter in the children's names even before we held our first VBS. This saved us time by not having to write all of their names in each year. 

As you can see there are the point categories for Attendance, Bible Verse, Activity Sheet, Visitor, and Participation. I also added a "Note" section to the far right for any additional information including the name of their visitor so we can be sure everyone is counted for and points are awarded to those who invited them.

We print up two copies of these sheets - one for the younger age group and one for the older age group. I take these sheets home at the end of each day and use them in tallying the daily points to be punched onto the children's point cards.

As you can see in this photo below, each child is wearing a card that corresponds to his team color (we usually divide the children up into two teams.) At the top of the card is a place for the child's name. Then below the name are "point stars" of (in this case) 10 points value each. Each day the child attends VBS, he is  given this card to wear for the day until game time so that he too can see his progress and be excited about how many points he earns throughout the week. Let me add that the children only receive these cards beginning on the second day. Everyone who comes for the first time (no matter what day) receives points for attendance, Bible verse, and the activity sheets. We do this to give those who can only attend one day a few points to be able to purchase something from the "store" at the end of the week.

Each day during snack time, we gather these point cards, and I take them home to use a hole puncher and punch the points on each card once I have tallied the child's points for each day. It is a bit time consuming, but I think it is important to do things orderly, and it is also so exciting for the kids each day to see more holes punched in their point cards!

The last day is quite busy as you must take time during the day's activities to add up the rest of the points earned from that last morning's registration and add it into the totals. That way the children have all of their points tabulated and you can reward those who invited the most guests, memorized the most verses, and then give them ALL of their points to spend in the "store"!

VBS 2010 - Some of the children with prizes they bought with their points

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like me to better explain some aspect of these posts so far about planning a VBS program. I look forward to hearing from you!