I’ve linked to some of my previous posts about Easter and included some of the new ideas we talked about today.  I’m excited to start making plans for my children and I hope this helps you in some way as you make your plans!

Resurrection Egg Scavenger Hunt

Easter Ideas – including a week-long, kid-friendly devotional plan, a resurrection cookie recipe, an Easter unit study, resurrection egg ideas and a worksheet link

Resurrection Roll Recipe

Resurrection Basket Ideas

In the Hands of a Child Easter Lapbook

FREE Homeschool Share Units

• The Legend of the Easter Egg
• The Parable of the Lily
• Rechenka’s Eggs
• The Tale of Three Trees

Some of my favorite Easter living literature:

Please watch this video this weekend if you have a moment.  You won’t regret it.

New Again

]]> http://ourjourneywestward.com/2008/03/have-a-blessed-easter/feed/ 0 http://ourjourneywestward.com/2008/03/easter-ideas/ http://ourjourneywestward.com/2008/03/easter-ideas/#comments Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:18:00 +0000 Cindy http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/westward/487865/

Easter is sneaking up quickly this year!  Here are links to three of my posts from last year with many ideas for a fun and meaningful celebration and ideas for the days leading up to Easter.

Resurrection Egg Scavenger Hunt

Christian Easter Links

Easter/Spring Ideas

Here’s a new idea I found from the wonderful ladies on the Five In A Row Message Boards last Easter.  Each member of your family privately writes down on a piece of paper the sins they struggle with.  Sometime before Easter, you nail the papers to a wooden cross, only to find the sins gone and a purple cloth on the cross on Easter morning!   Here is a link to that thread.

Besides the wooden cross, our plans from Palm Sunday to Easter this year include:

* This week-long devotional from Christianity Today.

* Resurrection Rolls and/or Easter Cookies

* Resurrection Baskets – I will come up with my own version blending these ideas:  basket one,  basket two (in Julie’s first post)

* Leaf Print Eggs

* A few favorite books:  The Tale of Three Trees,  Rechenka’s Eggs,  Easter Bunny, Are You For Real? , The Parable of the Lily .

I hope your Easter prepartations are meaningful, fun and make a huge impact with your children this year!!

* Give kids a handful to sort and create a graph showing what they have.  They can make a pictograph, bar graph, pie chart or spreadsheet.

* Estimate how many are in a jar, then create arrays from each color to make counting easier.

* Give handfuls and ask kids to make “fair shares” with the beans.  “How many beans would each person get if there were five friends coming over?  Or two friends?  What about eight friends?  Will there be any leftovers?  Is there a way to fair share leftovers?”

* Older kids can find the mean, median and mode in their handful of jelly beans.

* Create 3-dimensional shapes using jelly beans and toothpicks – cubes, pyramids, etc.

Plastic Eggs

*Put magnetic letters inside eggs.  Have kids pick several eggs out of a basket and create as many words as possible from the letters.

*Create simple matching games for little ones.  For example, write number words and numbers on small pieces of cardstock and place in eggs.  Kids open eggs and try to make correct matches.  You could do this with any number of skills:  contractions, math problems, clocks, money, homonyms/synonyms/antonyms, etc.

*Put vocabulary words in eggs.  Have your child draw a few eggs and create a great sentence, paragraph or story using the words.

Art/Crafts

*Cut small squares from tissue paper.  Mix 1 cup of warm water with 1 TBSP of vinegar.  Dip a piece of tissue paper into water, then lay on the shell of a hard-boiled egg.  Add more tissue paper to the egg.  When dry, peel off tissue paper for very fancy colored eggs.

*Save your colored shells after eating the eggs.  Crush them into small pieces and create mosaics by gluing the crushed pieces onto stiff paper.

Rabbits

Whether you do the Easter Bunny or not, spring is a great time to do a mini-unit on rabbits.  We’re going to put our info together in a lapbook.  Here’s what we plan to research:

*What’s the difference between a rabbit and hare?

*What is a rabbit’s habitat?

*What do they eat?

*When are they active?

*Do rabbits have predators?

*What defense mechanisms do rabbits use?

*What parts of the world do you find rabbits?

*Do rabbits live as families?

We’ll also:

*draw rabbits and label their parts

*create a diorama of a rabbit habitat

*create map showing where rabbits are found

*write a rabbit tale

*do some sort of rabbit food recipe

*check out lots of rabbit fiction and nonfiction from the library

http://www.christianitytoday.com/holidays/easter/features/activities.html – This looks WONDERFUL!  It’s a week’s worth of family devotionals and activities.

http://www.annieshomepage.com/resurrectioncookies.html – A recipe for resurrection cookies with Bible verses to turn the baking time into a devotion.

http://www.easyfunschool.com/article2122.html – This is a homeschool mini-unit on Easter.

http://www.teacherplanet.com/resource/easter2.php – Looks like it has lots of ideas and even some worksheets relating to Easter.

http://www.easyfunschool.com/article2110.html – Here’s another take on the resurrection eggs.

http://www.diva-girl-parties-and-stuff.com/support-files/resurrectioneggs.pdf

You simply cut out the clues and place them in plastic eggs.  Hide the eggs and have the children find all 12 before opening any.  (If you want each child to find their own set of 12 clues, designate a certain color egg for them to find.  For example: if you have two children, copy two sets of clues.  Place one set in green eggs and the other set in yellow eggs.  They are to only pick up their assigned color as they hunt.)

Next, they open one egg at a time, read the clue, look up the verse if necessary, then find the item from the clue.  You may choose to hide these items, too, or have them already out to make it easier.

Finally, go through the clues, verses and items together as a family and talk about the importance of each.  What a fun way to teach the story of Easter!!