Fun Easter Traditions With Your Kids

We are always trying to create new family traditions and the holidays lend themselves to some fun ones! Our kids are asking a lot more questions about Jesus and heaven and with the events that have taken place in our lives lately, we have had a lot of great opportunities to share about God and His love for us. With Easter coming up, we are building off our traditions of Easter egg hunts and I wanted to share some fun traditions we have enjoyed the past two years and ones that we are starting this year. This list will usually equal out to almost an activity a day during the week leading up to Easter. Feel free to use the "comments" to share some of your favorite ones.

1) Our new tradition this year is making Easter cookies. Click on this link http://www.dvo.com/recipes_archive/easter_cookie_story.html for the recipe but it isn't just about making cookies. Everything that is done along the way teaches kids a hands-on lesson about the Easter story down to the way you leave the cookies overnight and what you will find the next morning.

2) I wanted to figure out how to let our kids enjoy the Easter bunny and egg hunts but also keep the real meaning of Easter in their minds so I came up with a new tradition for our family this year. We are going to video our kids telling the Easter story and have them leave it out for the Easter bunny to watch when he comes to our house to fill their Easter baskets. It will be interesting to see how their perspective and understanding changes over the years and we will have a fun way to document it (you know I'm all about documenting and capturing everything :). This new tradition will also allow our kids to have fun thinking they are leaving a video message for the Easter bunny which allows them to have the opportunity to share the real meaning of Easter with the Easter bunny.

3) Depending on the age of your kids, this video, Miss Patty Cake: Eggstravaganza is great for preschoolers and has been a hit in our home for the past two Easters. I guess it also depends on the parents' tolerance level for an adult that dresses up to look like Raggedy Ann. :) It uses the resurrection eggs that you may have seen in stores and that is described below to tell the story of Jesus and there are preschoolers featured in the video with Miss Patty Cake and they dance and sing. This DVD is a great start to sharing the Easter story and you don't feel quite so silly dancing and singing along with your kids when you see Miss Patty Cake doing it, too. :)


4) Reading stories to them is also a lot of fun for us. We have a children's Bible that they enjoy but these two books, The Legend of the Easter Egg and A Tale of Three Trees are really good!

*This book is geared to slightly older children but we were able to modify the story-telling a bit to put it on their level. After reading the story and talking about it, we had fun dying eggs. This year we are going to do something different. The boys have their favorite egg that they dyed and we are going to talk about Jesus' sacrifice and relate it to them on a very small scale and ask them to give up their favorite egg that they made by giving it away or they can choose to give it to the Easter bunny when they leave out their Easter baskets.

Peyton putting the dye in the hot water.


A fun mess...


Their favorite eggs...


Our finished product... (Grant wants to know when they are going to hatch because they are already starting to crack. :)


I love this book for Easter too and it is also good to read at Christmas!


5)Make Resurrection Eggs to Tell the Real Easter Story to Children
Here is a step by step guide on how to make homemade resurrection eggs.
http://www.associatedcontent.comarticle/635999/make_resurrection_eggs_to_tell_the.html

6) This is also a different version to the resurrection eggs. Vince and I used the illustrations below to put inside Easter eggs at an Easter family festival a couple of years ago that he organized at the church where he was formerly on staff. These pictures tell the life of Jesus in a nutshell starting with His adult life so you can definitely adapt it with pictures of baby Jesus on up to His ascension to heaven, but these pictures would be a modified version to the resurrection eggs mentioned in #5. This year we are going to do a flashlight egg hunt in our yard with these pictures inside our eggs and then use them to tell the Easter story. We also have little treats from a basket where we have collected things over time to give them for the eggs they have collected. While we have done several of the same pictures in different eggs, you may want to have one "prize" egg that is the picture of the empty tomb and use that to explain that this is really why we even celebrate Easter. Here is a summary of the pictures and I'll share some of our talking points with our own kids from last year and ones that we will share this year in case you find this helpful to adapt to your family. Keep in mind ours are preschoolers, so this is very basic...



Top to bottom:

picture 1 (Jesus with the children) Jesus loved children so much and He tells us we are to come to Jesus with the faith of a child and believe in Him and what the Bible says about Him. Discuss what faith means? (believing in what we can't always see. Discuss the many ways our kids feel and know Jesus loves them.

picture 2 (Jesus healing a man) Discuss how Jesus did many miracles and we will share the miracles that He has done in our family. Some people did not like Jesus because they were jealous of who He was and His power.

picture 3 (Jesus praying) Discuss the importance of talking to God and how Jesus talked to God when the people were not nice to Him and when He was sad.

picture 4 (Jesus taken by the soldiers) The people who did not like Jesus came to take him away.

picture 5 (crown) Because He was the King of the Jews (we have told our boys this is a group of people..what are known as God's chosen people) they put a crown on Him but this crown was made of thorns and it hurt him. When they put this crown on Him, they were making fun of Him so when you feel sad or someone is not nice to you, you can know that Jesus has had this happen too and He knows just how to help you.

picture 6 (Jesus carrying the cross) They made him carry a big cross. He did this even though He was tired and hurt because He loved you.

picture 7 (cross) Because we have preschoolers, this is just a picture of a cross, not Jesus on the cross. However, we will say that He was put on that cross and it hurt Him. Our kids know that nobody is perfect except for Jesus and this year we will zero in on the fact that since nobody is perfect that we need someone who is perfect to save us and help us so that one day we can go to heaven where Jesus is. Then, we have talked about people who are in heaven that we will one day see again.

picture 8 (picture of a tomb with a rock rolled away) Discuss Jesus was the only one who did not stay dead. He came back to life on the 3rd day and He walked out of the tomb. Because he rose on the 3rd day, we celebrate Easter!

picture 9 (ascension to heaven) After He came out of the tomb, he saw his loved ones and His disciples and told them that He was going to heaven but anyone that believed in Him would one day be there with Him.

*If you want this document, either leave me a comment or email me and I'll send the attachment.

Hope you all have fun with your own Easter traditions! Happy Easter!!