Tending the Garden of Our Hearts and Ancient Faith Ministries present Rooted in Prayer: Virtual Vacation Church Camp

Because so many of our vacation church camps will have to be different this year, we’ve created a virtual camp that your family or parish can enjoy from home! The theme is Prayer, and the camp is recommended for use with the beautiful book, A Child’s Guide to Prayer from Ancient Faith Publishing. The camp is aimed at elementary school children, but suitable for their older and younger siblings.

We are finding that several parishes are using our Virtual Vacation Church Camp in the Fall! If you don’t have a need for VCC this summer, you might consider this! Scroll down for detailed information on how your parish can share Rooted in Prayer over Zoom.

What's included?

Created by authors and podcasters Elissa Bjeletich and Kristina Wenger, the camp is presented in five days and features a combination of videos and parent-led activities. Each day includes the following:

Videos:

• Opening Prayers
• Daily Lesson
• Saint of the Day
• Music with CeCe
• Closing Prayers

Written Materials:

• Craft Projects
• Activities
• Discussion Prompts
• Snack Time Recipes
• Games
• Printable Activity Sheets

The Virtual Vacation Church Camp is designed to be flexible. Families can enjoy camp on their own at their own pace, or multiple families or a whole parish can engage together via Zoom or other video conferencing software.

How it Works: Virtual Vacation Church Camp on Zoom (or similar platform)

This year, we’re all navigating unknown waters in youth ministry! We’re trying new things and learning to be flexible. Our Virtual Vacation Church Camp can be used in person, but it also works on Zoom (or on similar online conferencing platforms.) Here’s how.

The Virtual Vacation Church Camp offers five days of materials. The five sessions could be scheduled all in one week, or they can be split over time — perhaps they are five one-day retreats spaced out over the fall or the year!

A week before your event begins, send families an email with the following information:

• Date & time: Ask everyone to come online several minutes before your start time, so that you can let them in from the Zoom “waiting room” (this allows you to admit only those people you know, so that you won’t have surprise strangers popping in to disrupt. That happens.) This also gives people time to fix any unforeseen technical glitches.
• Link to the Zoom room: You’ll want to use your “personal meeting room” in Zoom. Go to “copy invitation” and then paste that information into an email for your families. (You don’t really need the whole thing — just the “Join Zoom Meeting” link and the password will do.) That link will carry them to your “personal meeting room” any time. (Note: using the personal meeting room allows you to have just the one link for every session, avoiding confusion.) Note that you can add co-hosts to help you manage Zoom throughout the event.
• PDFs from the day’s PDF packet, asking families to print the worksheets and gather needed materials in advance. You can send the entire PDF, or you can isolate just the pages you want them to have (printable worksheets, recipes, etc.)

The day’s program begins on Zoom. When you’re ready to begin, you can say an Opening Prayer yourself, or play our Opening Prayer video. All videos are played on the shared screen. Here’s how:

• Download the videos from the vimeo site in advance.
• Have the videos cued up and ready to go.
• As host, click “participants” to see a list of the people who are currently online with you. At the bottom of that list, you can use “Mute All” to keep things quiet when you’re showing videos. You can “Unmute” one participant at a time or use “Unmute All” when appropriate.
• Click the up arrow to the right of “Share Screen”. Choose “one participant can share at a time” and click on “advanced settings” to set your room so that only the host can share their screen.
• When you’re ready to begin the video, click “Share Screen” and click on the video. When you press play, the whole group should be seeing and hearing the video together on their Zoom screens.

After the opening prayer, you’ll watch the Lesson video on shared screen. After the video, stop sharing your screen, and host a conversation using our Discussion Questions for that lesson. This includes some warm-up questions to get kids participating and then leads into deeper and more meaningful conversation on the topic.

After the discussion, give people a break from Zoom. Families can do the craft project, use the recipe to make a snack, do the printable puzzles and worksheets, etc. This allows the kids to get a break and to have some hands-on content! Families can talk about the lesson as they go (making the parents part of the teaching and encouraging the family to take on religious education).

Later, the group assembles for a second time on Zoom. The afternoon content is lighter than the morning content.

Watch the Saint of the Day video together on Shared Screen, and then the Music Class. Encourage the kids to move around, dancing and singing along.

Finally, every day we have a Zoom game for the whole crowd! Turn off the shared screen and play the game together, to end the day on a fun and sociable note!

Download the sample parish Zoom schedule (PDF)

Preview the original music created for Rooted in Prayer by CeCe Yentzen!

Welcome to the Temple

If You Asked

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