Easter brings about many images of bunnies, candy, and hidden eggs. It’s one of the markings of spring and renewal. Using the common imagery and themes around this holiday, there are plenty of educational activities to do with your kids that represent Easter. Art, science, and math are just a few subjects to cover in these fun educational Easter activities.
Educational Easter Activities your kids will love
Painting Easter Eggs
This is a pretty common activity for Easter, but it’s still educational and fun. Though the lessons may vary depending on the age of your children, topics like cooking as well as color theory can be implemented in this activity. Have your children help you hard-boil the eggs you’re going to paint. There’s a lot of science involved in cooking, so explaining the process can be educational. Plus, cooking is a great way to make memories.
You can even talk about animals who lay eggs and create an animal science lesson. When coloring the eggs, talk about the color wheel and which colors mixed together make what color. Allow them to experiment and make new shades themselves. You can buy an egg painting kit or choose a child-friendly paint and create a kit yourself.
Picking Flowers
Easter’s relation to spring creates a lot of opportunities in terms of plants and educational activities related to them. You can plant a seed and explain the process as it grows, start a garden, or simply pick some flowers and go over the anatomy of their petals and stems. Print off some worksheets and help your children learn how to identify roots, leaves, and petals. For older kids, work on identifying stamens and discuss photosynthesis.
At the end of your lesson, you can put the flowers in a vase or even press them as a keepsake to remember this fun Easter activity. Just be sure you’re supervising your kiddos so they pick safe wildflowers and not flowers from a neighbor’s garden.
Making Bubbles
It’s easy enough to buy bubbles from the store and let your children run around outside, blowing bubbles into the air. However, making bubbles can be a fun chemistry lesson as well. First, make a bubble wand with a popsicle stick and a pipe cleaner. Allow them to shape the pipe cleaner into any fun shape, like a triangle or a flower, and glue it to the popsicle stick.
Next, combine ingredients to create the bubble solution: a mixture of dish soap, water, and sugar. Let them have fun creating shapes, learning how bubbles react to outside objects, and watch as their ingredients turn into bubble solution.
Outdoor Scavenger Hunt
An outdoor scavenger hunt not only gets the kids outside to run off some energy, it also helps them to begin identifying items and practice counting. To start, compile a list of outdoor items. For instance, seven small rocks, two purple flowers, four pinecones, etc. Allow them to go find these items through their ability to ask questions, identify items, find colors, and count.
It’s always important to incorporate math into everyday projects in order to improve their strength in STEM-related fields later on in life. Even small, math-related lessons like these can help them grasp numbers and patterns better. Not only that, but you can discuss each item after they’ve found them, turning it into an environmental activity as well.
Drawing the Seasons
Seasonal changes are very topical for Easter because of the holiday’s placement in terms of the equinox. Take this as an opportunity to teach your kids about the seasons, weather patterns, and why the other half of the world experiences opposite seasons. Allow them to draw what spring looks like to them, then summer, fall, and winter. Talk about what happens to plants and animals as the seasons change.
For older kids, you can draw moon phases and discuss Easter’s relation to the full moon. You can talk about tides, the ocean, and even a history lesson on how our Western version of Easter came to be or how other places celebrate this time of year.
Educational activities for kids don’t have to be elaborate or difficult; they can be simple and explanatory. Depending on the age of your children, you can teach them by doing some simple activities.
For example, you don’t have to know the exact reasoning for the chemical reaction that occurs when hard-boiling eggs in preparation for painting them, but showing them the reaction is still beneficial. Since Easter happens in the spring, many of these activities can happen outside; an exciting endeavor after a long winter. Whichever activity you choose, your kids will love having an educational activity to celebrate this time of year.
Author Bio: Brooke Faulkner is a writer and mom in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. You can check out more of her writing on twitter, @faulknercreek
