Making Easter Meaningful for Kids

Easter can often turn into more of a celebration of spring than a religious holiday, but for Christians the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection are the center of this observance. While all the decorated eggs and baby animals are cute and fun, there’s a deeper meaning behind the celebration of new life.

I’ve shared religious Easter activities for kids before, but I wanted to give you some more ideas if you’re looking for ways to make Easter more meaningful for kids.

I always love the idea of tying holidays to acts of service or kindness in the community, and Coffee and Carpool uses the Easter season to encourage her kids with kindness activities. The post includes some ideas you can use for acts of kindness, or you can come up with your own. For however many days before Easter as you want, you can make a paper chain and each link in the chain contains an idea for an act of kindness.

Some people take the reverse advent calendar idea and use it for Lent, or you can take time to clean the house as a family and find items you aren’t using that you can donate to others who might need them.

Using a symbol of the empty grave is a common way to teach kids about Easter (and there’s a crafty version in that Easter post linked above). This can be done with resurrection rolls (Yummy Healthy Easy has a super simple version made with crescent roll dough), or try this recipe from Around My Family Table for meringue resurrection cookies.

You can also use a tool like an Easter story egg to help tell the story of Easter to kids. And of course you can read books that touch on the religious aspects of the holiday. The True Meaning of Easter by Melissa Wingo follows a mouse through the Easter story and includes relevant Bible verses. And while it is more about Easter marking the coming of spring than it is about religion, Easter on the Farm by Phyllis Alsdurf includes a spread about going to church as part of their Easter activities. It also shares the tradition of the Easter tree made with spring branches, which some families decorate with sentiments about Jesus or things they are grateful for that God has provided.

Does your family have a special way of making Easter meaningful for kids? I’d love to hear about it!

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Religious and Acts of Kindness Advent Calendars

Shark Week generally happens in July, but any time is a good time to learn more about sharks.

First, start with some fun whale facts like these from Kids Craft Room. Here I learned about the dwarf lantern shark, which is the smallest shark and only grows to about 6-8 inches (about 15-20 cm) long. It also emits light. How cool is that?

Natural Beach Living has some great printable shark information guides, where kids can learn about different kinds of sharks, match the facts to the pictures, or print out doubles and do a shark memory game.

Living Life an Learning has some great shark activity pages including the parts of a shark, types of sharks, a crossword puzzle and more. Also check out their parts of a shark and word scramble download, and a life cycle worksheet.

Learn about how sharks float with this great activity from JDaniel4’s Mom.

Need more facts about sharks? This fact pact from The WOLFe PACK on Teacher Pay Teachers includes fact sheets, a printable flip book, informational text, vocabulary, comprehension questions and more.

Living Montessori Now has a great collection of shark themed activities with a Montessori inspired twist. You’ll find a shark roll and cover, shark phonics and lots more shark activities Deb has collected from all over the Internet.

Remember the “Sharknado” movie? A Few Shortcuts turned the combination of sharks and tornadoes into a fun science activity. You’ll need a bottle connector for this project but otherwise should have everything you need on hand. Use their template to make your sharks out of aluminum foil. So fun!

You can also do some shark themed coloring with these coloring pages from Encouraging Moms at Home. Or make a cool 3D shark with this template from korkotak. And there are tons of different shark crafts collected in this post from Kids Activities Blog.

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