Spring and Easter Themed Nature Crafts

As the weather starts to get a bit warmer in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s time to start heading outside for nature walks and collecting natural materials for projects. Here are some great ideas for using natural materials on spring and Easter projects.

Let kids explore what it’s like to be a bird by giving them the challenge to create a nest using only natural materials and no adhesives. This idea comes from Kids Craft Room and it gives you a chance to collect materials, construct your nests, talk about and watch birds (or find bird nest building videos), even crafty tiny eggs or birds to go into the nest.

Put the kids to work collecting all the little fallen twigs in the yard and then you can craft with them. DIY Candy has collected 20+ craft ideas using twigs, and while they aren’t all suitable for kids (at least not without supervision), they should give you some good ideas for how to use sticks in your crafting.

Mother Natured used blown eggs to decorate with natural materials for a pretty and long-lasting Easter decoration. You could do the same thing with plastic or papier mache eggs if you have those on hand.

Or you can use egg shapes cut out of cardboard and decorate them with natural materials, like in this post from Sprouting Wild Ones. Or gather materials and make egg-shaped pieces of clay — or really any shape you like — and use the plant matter to make prints in the clay and paint them when they are dry. My Bright Ideas Blog shows you how.

Arts and Bricks has a cute collection of nature crafts for Easter, too. I particularly like the leaves cut like eggs and then painted or otherwise decorated, which is shown above with a picture from Learning and Exploring Through Play.

Need even more Easter and spring nature craft ideas? Check out this list from The Magic Onions.

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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