Easter Activities

We had a great Easter yesterday.  We went to Woodcreek's service and then met up with my family for church, lunch and an Easter Egg Hunt.  Our kids loved hunting Easter eggs (they went at each of their schools, a hunt with friends on Saturday and then family on Sunday) and I tried to incorporate a lot of Easter activities last week as we got ready.  Our 4 year old asked several times "how many days until Easter?" so it gave us lots of time to focus on this special weekend!

I kicked off our week with a fun Easter snack after school on Monday.  Individual dirt cups with a bunny (peep) in it.  We try to stay away from too many sweet snacks, so this was a fun treat for the kids.

Then we did some "educational" activities.  Our 3 year old needs a lot of practice for fine motor skills, so I bought some "kid tweezers" (they came in a set with a magnifying glass which the kids love to use outside) and this was the first time we used them.

The kids had to pick up a pom pom with the tweezers...

 

...and drop it in to the same color egg.  So it was fine motor and color matching.  It took our 3 year old a long time to get through the bowl of pom poms, but she persevered and did a great job!  Our 4 year old loved playing with it too!

 The activity I found for him was matching Capital and Lowercase letters.  He's learned so much since starting Pre-K at the end of last year and now can identify most capital letters, so we're trying to work on lowercase ones.  I'd done a similar activity around Valentine's day with heart puzzles, but this one was easier since the color of egg matched up so he was very successful with it.  And sister got a turn to work on opening and closing the eggs--once brother put them all together and they switched activities, so did one at a time opening the egg and then putting it back together so she got more fine motor work in! :)

We also did some gross motor games to help get energy out!  I used this idea of putting different numbers and activities in eggs and the kids opened them one by one and then did the activity--ranging from 12 soldier marches to 4 ninja kicks to 1 somersault.  I also had some eggs that had numbers 10-20 in them and the kids would open them and our 4 year old would tell us the number and the kids would do that many jumps across the yard.  It was a fun way to work on recognizing the numbers that are a little harder for him.

The kids love all kinds of candy, so one afternoon we did some jelly bean sorting and graphing.  The 3 year old helped us put all the jelly beans in piles of the same color and then the 4 year old helped count them all and counted as I graphed each one.  Our bag had a lot of red ones and not many white ones.

And our course we tried to keep the focus on the real meaning of Easter.  Each day we went through this poem and opened the eggs that spelled out the word EASTER to learn about the story of Jesus' death and resurrection.

And we loved this Jellybean prayer that I could talk through the kids as they ate their snack.  They got to savor each flavor as I talked about what each color meant.

This weekend we also made Resurrection Cookies (recipe from my sweet mother-in-law) on Saturday night for the kids to wake up to Sunday morning.  It was a good way to walk through all the Jesus went through during the crucifixion and then the empty tomb.  And for breakfast yesterday we made Resurrection Rolls.  Yesterday morning was a little crazy trying to get out the door, so I didn't get any pictures, but it was a fun start to our morning--any day the kids get cookies and rolls with marshmallows for breakfast is a good day in their book!

We had a lot of fun last week and I'm looking forward to using some of these activities all Spring!