DIY: Custom Take Home Bracelets for Kids

DIY: Custom Take Home Bracelets for Kids

Do Sunday handouts to parents and kids ever feel like an exercise in futility?

I know that’s what it sometimes feels like to us.

Inevitably on Mondays, we find handouts (we so meticulously prepared) in all corners and on all surfaces of the church: trash cans, tables, sanctuary seats, bathroom sinks, the parking lot, basically everywhere but in the hands of the people they were meant for.

We’ve done several things to add more value to handouts liking personalizing them for parents, which has helped in adding value for parents to want to keep them. (You can learn more about this idea here: Giving Parents Personalized Steps to Take with Their Kids Every Week.)

But that didn’t solve the issue of handouts we gave to kids.

We have something called “On the Drive Home,” which is a slip of paper with two questions for kids to ask their parents as their family is driving home.

After a few months of giving kids these slips of paper, we noticed that kids were either leaving them behind or handing them straight to their parents.

In other words, they weren’t using them how we designed them to be used.

So we decided to try something different to help kids use their on the drive home questions.

After bouncing ideas back and forth, we decided to try printable Tyvek bracelets instead of the strips of paper we’d been using, and it has gone over really well.

Our kids love that they get a bracelet every week, and we love that they can’t lose it because it’s attached to their wrists.

Here’s how to create custom and affordable Tyvek bracelets.

Purchase the bracelets.

Buy bracelets in whatever color you want (200 for $6.99 here: http://a.co/hg0Ka2k).

Create a template for printing to the bracelets.

Since the bracelet sheets are non-standard dimensions, we used Adobe Illustrator to create a custom template for printing to them.

Decide what content you want to put on the bracelets.

For our first batch, we put the month’s virtue, patience, because we didn’t know how they were going to turn out, but going forward we’re looking into doing questions like we’ve done in the past.

Of course, you can put whatever you want: the verse, a big question, the month’s theme, etc.

Finally, simply hand them out to kids on Sunday.

We’ve learned through trial and error that you should have kids put them on before pickup (during Small Groups or free time) because it is impossible to keep up with putting them on kids as they’re picked up.

Is there anything you’ve done at your church to add value or encourage parents and kids to actually use the handouts you give them?

This article originally appeared here.