While our Vacation Bible School programs at Incarnation Lutheran Church in Shoreview (where I attend) have always been well planned and well attended, available curriculum from ELCA World Hunger has rarely been used. Our hunger group (currently all retired folks) decided that WE would use the current curriculum as our study for 2025-2026. If we found it easy to use and informative, we could then better recommend it to our youth and family staff.
Have we been more than surprised! We used At the Table, a resource based on stories and story-telling. The title comes from Luke and the story of the road to Emmaus. The authors suggest that being a faithful disciple means we can learn from everyone’s stories, thus the material is intergenerational and encourages a common ministry.
Our group has found the divisions of the program (openings and skit, small group time, story time, games, snacks, crafts, simulation station, and dinner table talk) to be useful and, most importantly, adaptable. We appreciated the options provided along with suggested age ranges. The pages recommended for “take home” each day provided a good recap for parents as well as conversation starters for everyone in the family at their own table. The stories, both domestic and international, as well as the snacks, enlarged our understanding of “neighbor.” The recommended YouTube links were amazing and the fold-out map help locate ourselves in the world, too.
Did we learn? Of course we did — and from Day 1 when we remembered the story of The Little Red Hen to learning about the six types of wheat grown around the world. We made paper fans and shared our heartwarming stories. And our tasty snacks matched well with the geographic location of our story. And that was only Day 1; there was so much more to learn. Will we recommend this to our staff? Of course we will! The stories have been updated for 2026, so there is even a newer version than the onen we used. We recommend that you check it out for yourselves and see if it will fit for your congregation’s Vacation Bible School planning.
Download the At the Table curriculum here.
Vernita Kennen
Incarnation, Shoreview
