We created this set for an 8-week series I wrote this year called #blessed. It will be available for you to purchase TODAY! In this series, kids will learn about one of the Beatitudes or blessings Jesus taught in his famous Sermon on the Mount each week. They will discover that living a truly #blessed life isn’t always picture perfect. The cost for this set design was around $30 for us because we already had some of the foam board, paint, and twine on hand. Also, we left up the led tape from our previous set design to get more use out of it. My inspiration for this set design and series was hashtags and polaroid-style pictures (think Instagram). Even though a lot of elementary aged kids don’t have social media accounts yet they already love hashtags and are quite familiar with Instagram. All the kids loved this series, especially our preteens! For this series, we focused primarily on the main stage area, and continued to utilize the permanent “screens” around the room we installed during during our previous set design.

Let’s talk about the main stage pieces! I included some closer up pictures of what we did with the main stage so you can see what you are trying to create. For the left side of the stage, we made a 4 ft. tall foam hashtag. The hashtag was made out of leftover foam board, but if you need to buy it you can pick it up at Lowe’s. You are looking for the 3/8 inch thick 4×8 ft. insulation foam board with the silver coating. You will need to carefully peel the silver coating and plastic backing off of the foam before attempting to cut it. I used a ruler and a pencil to draw the hashtag on the foam board before cutting it. It was surprisingly harder than I thought to draw a decent hashtag. I would suggest you use a hot knife to cut foam board unless you love making a huge mess. I have a super cheap one that gets the job done, but there are more expensive options as well. You definitely get what you pay for with hot knives. If you end up going with the cheaper option (right there with you), don’t expect it to last more than a couple jobs before it will stop heating up. I was originally planning on making four of these (two for the main stage and two for the 1st-2nd grade room), but when I realized how long it took me to make one I went another direction with the rest of the set design.

The right side of the stage ended up getting something different and I really liked the final result. We made four different sized “frames” using coated foam board (the thin stuff you can buy almost anywhere). We cut them out and painted them two different colors of blues. We also made several hashtags out of the same foam board and painted them blue. You can choose to use whatever color you like. We took one of the frames and attached a hashtag to the corner. Then we strung twine back and forth inside the frame and used mini clothespins to attach polaroid-style pictures to the twine. We attached the remaining hashtags and frames to the bottom of our screen using zip ties. We added more twine and clothespins with pictures under the screen. We had the pictures made using foxprint.com. They are .35 cents each and you can customize them to say anything you want at the bottom of the picture for free! We used pictures from the last year of the kids and services and came up with funny hashtags for each picture. We also created photos for several verse games we used during the #blessed series through this service. I would definitely recommend it!

I forgot to take a picture of our 1st-2nd grade room, but we kept it nice and easy and portable as usual! We used the large inflatable hashtags pictured above as our decor for the room. We also printed out the logo from the series on cardstock and attached it to the front of the hashtags to cover up the Swimline logo. We also added this cute light-up hashtag to our teaching cart in the room.

We had some leftover polaroid pictures so we added a little #flair to our rolling info cart for outside the kid’s room. We use this cart to put our parent cards and other event cards on for the parents to pick up when they are dropping off or picking up their kids.

I loved how easy it was to use these awesome screens we put up during our last series again for this series! This time we turned them into giant polaroid pictures all over the room. The kids loved seeing pictures of themselves from events and services throughout the year on the walls. We made the pictures in Canva and added the #blessed logo to the bottom of each picture. If you are interested in the full tutorial on what we did for these make-shift screens you can check out this post.

If you are interested in more fun #blessed ideas you can check out my #lock-in event and the new #blessed curriculum series!