25 Aug Friendship – Lunch Room – September 2017; Our Plan

Posted at 15:48h in 2017, Environment, Friendship, Life App, Once by lisa 0 Comments
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Life App: Friendship—using your words and actions to show others you care. 
Theme: Lunch Room – Make Space At The Table
Date: September 2017

I Think I’m Finally Excited…

As I mentioned in this post, I was really struggling with how to represent this month’s Theme and Life App in an engaging way on our Large Group stage. While I love the theme, the concept, the way Friendship will be taught, and the fact that it’s all happening with a “back to school” vibe… I just couldn’t figure out how to turn that theme into something engaging with a WOW factor for our set design. We had a lot of ideas (that you can read about here) but truth-be-told, the school cafeteria makes this former teacher want to gag 😉 so putting any representation of that on our stage just wasn’t cutting it for me.

But, after several discussions, I think we’ve finally landed on something that will be fun! It will hopefully carry out the theme and get kids excited about “making space at the table” for friends!

Our Plan

Taking inspiration from the photos below – and a post on the 252 Partners Facebook page about plate sets that were being sold at Walmart – we came up with an idea.

Since our large projection screens are a huge part of our collective backdrop, we always want to coordinate our color scheme and/or setting on stage to what is on the screens above (see photos below)…

For this month, our projection screens will showcase the Life App graphic (Friendship) on the center screen (or Prop for you Pro-Presenter users) and the Theme graphic will flank the prop on either side.

From that, we decided on the following:

  • The burnt orange color from the word Friendship in the Life App graphic will be the color on our backdrop (5 panels of insulation foam).
  • We purchased several of the plate sets pictured above from Walmart.
  • To stay in keeping with the colors in the graphics, we will use all but the red plates from the plate sets. Blues, yellows, and greens all go pretty well with the graphics. While there is some red in the graphics, we thought it would clash with the orange backdrop and with the blue, yellow and green – it felt a bit primary or preschool-ish.
  • We will configure the sectioned lunch trays from the plate sets in a building block formation in the top left corner and bottom right corner of the backdrop. We will attach them to the backdrop with Velcro since they are plastic and cannot be pinned to the insulation foam.
  • We will use the rest of the plate sets (forks, spoons, plate, soup bowl, cup) to create place settings.
  • These place settings will be mounted on rectangles of white craft foam (think placemat) with a hot glue gun.
  • Then, the place settings will be pinned to the center panels of the backdrop in a large circle as if they are on a table.
  • We will use the Cricut to cut white letters shadowed by navy blue that say, “Make Space At The Table.” This phrase will hang in the center of the circle. 
  • A black card table and chairs will be set off to one corner of the stage to be used each week during the large group production.
  • We may put lunchboxes on the table or brown bag lunches or both. 

One Day Build

Our calendar is a bit nutty with back to school stuff, volunteer training, etc. As a result, it was going to be hard to have two build nights as we normally do with our set design team (you can read about that process here). So, we are striking our summer Gadgets & Gizmos set (it’s been up for 3 months you guys!) this Sunday and building next month’s set all on the same day.

I knew with only one build day, we needed a plan that would make for an awesome set, but would also be simple enough to finish in one day after striking a large set. I think this one is going to be fun. In fairness, our set design team leader and I did come out last night with a few people to paint the backdrop and start the process of a make-over for our Imagination Destination cart (that was a huge success this summer, but we need it to not be Gadgety and Gizmo-ey going forward). But hopefully, since those big pieces are done, our build on Sunday will go quickly. Here is a peek at what we worked on last night…