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!

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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