Sunday School Murals for Infants and Toddlers

This can be the most fun step in the mural painting process! Use your creativity. You can stage a Bible scene from a familiar story. One of the most used scenes is Noah's ark. This is a favorite for good reason! Kids love animals almost as much as vibrant color. Other scenes used often are Creation and Baby Jesus in the Manger.

But if you want to choose a Bible scene, don't feel you are limited to the three I've mentioned! Use one of the books on Sunday School murals that are available to get your ideas flowing. Another option is to get a high quality coloring book. Remember - it is just a tracing process!

At our church, we have high quality murals all down the hall of our education building and in the halls and rooms of our preschool classes. So when we went to redo our infant and toddler classrooms this year, we looked for themes that hadn't already been used. Since our infant and toddler curriculum are both based on songs, we decided to go with children's Bible songs as the themes.

In our toddler room, we decided to go with the song "Blue Skies and Rainbows". If you are unfamiliar with this song, here is a YouTube video with the music. The verses mention blue skies and rainbows in the first verse, than tall mountains and green valleys in the second. This made for lots of mural material. We also wrote the lyrics on the wall to make it even more music themed.

In our infant room, we went with "Jesus Loves Me". While the pictures don't show lyrics, we did design it to write the lyrics of the song on the wall mimicking our toddler room.

Before you begin the mural process, set down in the middle of your room and plan out where you want your mural. Take in to consideration any furniture you'll have in the room and the placement. If your mural is going to be hidden, you've put in a lot of work for something that won't be seen.

Stand at the door and look at what you'll see from there. That's where the children begin to cling to their parents. If they see fun and interesting things from that vantage point, it can be very inviting! It is also what visiting parents see first and the importance of their children to your church family is immediately evident.

Lastly, remember how big your audience is. If the occupants of your room are crawling infants, make sure that you have things they can see from inches above the floor. If you use a cradle roll table like many churches, consider putting pictures that can be seen from the table.

There is no wrong way to paint! Using simple craft paint we were able to use many colors but still stay within a reasonable budget. We would edge the design first if there was a large space to paint, then fill it in. In some places we had to paint 3 or 4 coats, but priming the design with white paint helped to limit the amount of needed coats.

On many of the small design touches, we used paint pens. That is how we did the lyrics in the "Blue Skies and Rainbows" room as well. It gives you far more precision than a brush, and you get good paint coverage.