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!

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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