Easter is such a fun season for kids - the anticipation of finding an Easter basket full of goodies, the Sunday best clothes, and all the sweets. Jump start your spring holiday by hosting an Easter egg hunt for kids.
Ask each child to bring an empty Easter basket to fill with eggs as they find them. Have some Easter snacks and some games to play when the hunt is over.
Invitations to Your Easter Egg Hunt
Invite our neighborhood children, your child’s friends and classmates, or have the whole soccer team, scout group or preschool class. Barring bad weather, an Easter egg hunt is best outdoors, so don’t be afraid of large numbers.
Get creative with your invitations. If you can hand-deliver the invitations, write your invitations on small pieces of pastel paper, roll them up and tuck them inside a large plastic Easter egg. With paint or permanent marker, decorate the outside and write “To:” and “From:” on the outside.
Setting Up an Easter Egg Hunt
Buy plastic Easter eggs that open up. The plain, solid-color eggs are fairly inexpensive, but better yet, buy them on sale at the end of the season for an Easter egg hunt the following year.
Fill each egg with candy, small toys, or a combination of both. You can fill some eggs with a few dimes or nickels, too. Think about the ages of the children at your Easter egg hunt before you put anything dangerously small in the eggs.
Hide the eggs throughout the yard, within a set area. Make some easy to find – sitting in the middle of the yard in the grass – and some hard to find – behind bushes, high up in trees and well camouflaged.
Easter Egg Hunt Rules
It’s best to ask that an adult accompany each child, if possible, especially if you have very young children or if you have a wide range of ages.
To make it a fair contest and avoid upset, crying children, roughly divide the number of eggs you’ve hidden by the number of children participating and tell the children once they find X number of eggs, they should stop looking or help a friend find some.
Try to make the Easter egg hunt as non-competitive as possible, to allow the more sensitive children to have a good time.
Easter Games and Activities for Kids
- Guess How Many Jelly Beans - Fill a large glass jar with jelly beans and have the children guess how many jelly beans there are in the jar.
- Egg-on-a-Spoon Race– Dye some Easter eggs in advance and have the kids run a relay race balancing an egg on a spoon.
- Easter Bunny Tag – The child who is the Easter Bunny is “it.” All the other children are little bunnies. It’s a game of tag, but everyone has to hop in a crouching position. The child who gets tagged is “it” and the new Easter Bunny!
- Easter Crafts – Suite 101’s Kids’ Crafts page has some ideas for fun and easy Easter Crafts, including making an Easter tree, making a lamb necklace and bunny dominoes.
- Decorate Easter Eggs - Put out some craft supplies and let the kids decorate hard-boiled eggs using different materials.
Yummy Easter Foods for Kids
There’s something so springy, so Eastery about Jell-O, it’s the perfect light snack for an Easter egg hunt. Jell-O sells gelatin moulds that are shaped like 3-dimensional eggs, jelly beans and Easter shapes. Have fun making Easter shaped Jell-O snacks for the little egg hunters at your party.
Kids will love this recipe for little bird’s nests made of chow mein noodles, filled with jelly bean eggs.
Jelly Bean Bird’s Nests
- 2 cups mini marshmallows
- ¼ cup butter
- 6 ounces chow mein noodles
- Jelly beans – the speckled ones that look like bird’s eggs, if you can find them.
In a large saucepan combine marshmallows and butter. Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until melted, about 7 minutes. Stir in noodles until well coated. With buttered fingers, press mixture on bottom and up the sides of each cup of a buttered 12-cup muffin pan. Refrigerate for at lest 2 hours or until firm. Remove from cups. Fill with jelly beans. Makes 12 nests.
Here are more ideas for Easter egg hunts.
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