Easter Activities

At our house we celebrate Easter.  Over the course of the week we engaged in a lot of Easter themed activities.   The first one was making Easter Bunny Cookies.  For this recipe you make a basic sugar cookie and flip gingerbread cookie cutters to make the silhouette of a bunny.  This activity was a hit with all three kids.  This activity provided plenty of opportunity for learning such as fine motor skills, sensory play, following instructions, recipe/procedural writing and letter writing.  As I have mentioned in a previous post, it is also a great way to look at chemistry, measurement, capacity and fractions.

When we were finished making the cookies, after reading an article about whether delivering baked goods in acceptable under the COVID-19 pandemic, we felt it was safe to deliver cookies to our neighbour across this street.  This was a fun opportunity to incorporate letter writing.

Another fun activity we did this week was to learn to draw Easter themed pictures on Kids Art Hub on youtube.  The Easter egg lesson taught the kids about overlapping shapes in a picture to give a neat effect.  The kids loved this.

One morning we found a note from the Easter Bunny outside our house.  The Easter Bunny just wanted to check in and see how the kids were doing during this pandemic and see if they could help him figure out how to deliver their treats safely.  Merryn decided to write back to the Easter Bunny and tell him to wear a mask while visiting our house.

Today, we also prepared a couple of things for our windows.  The first thing we made was a Happy Easter sign.  The second thing we did was to plant carrot seeds so we would have a supply for the Easter Bunny when he came back to visit next year.  When we did this we talked about what seeds need to grow.  They need to have their seed coast softened with water or rain and be at the right temperature.  We talked about how seeds have a food store inside of them and how when they are read, an embryo pokes out of the seed.  Roots grow down into the soil and the shoots grow up towards the sun.  We also experimented by putting the carrot top in water to see if it would grow a shoot.

On Easter, we decided to do an egg experiment.  For this project you need eggs, shaving cream and food colouring.  You put shaving cream in a dish, put in food colouring, give it a swirl with a chop stick and then gently immerse the eggs, carefully folding over the shaving cream.  After 20 minutes you wipe them off and voila!  Marbled eggs.  To expand this activity we decided to try it with plastic eggs as well.  We examined the eggs and predicted which ones would turn out better.  
Spoiler-alert...the plastic eggs did not work at all.  We learned the real eggs are more porous so can absorb the colour.  The plastic eggs are not.

After Easter we wrote good old fashioned thank you notes to the Easter Bunny.