*1st published on fathersofmultiples.com
Easter is the biggest holiday of the Spring season! Easter is also synonymous with the concepts of renewed growth and fertility as we move from winter towards summer (that’s the reason for the eggs and bunnies). You'll find plenty of plays at local churches, Easter egg hunts, and chances to meet your favorite rabbit and maybe pose for a photo in your Sunday best. But what do you do to occupy the kids when the sugar starts to set in? There are plenty of fun, themed family crafts to go along with the holiday.
Here’s some ideas so you aren’t at a loss for things to do.
Tie-Dyed Eggs
While you’re dying your eggs to hide, add some tie-dyed eggs to your collection. Simply combine a teaspoon of vegetable oil with any of your colors. Then dip your eggs in like normal, and they’ll come out tie-dyed. Flashing back to the '60s has never been easier! A word of caution: Be sure you've gotten all the regular colored eggs you want before adding the oil! Once you mix it in, there's no going back.
Paper Plate Easter Bunnies
Get two paper plates, cut your ears out of the first plate. The second plate acts as your bunny’s face. Color in the pink of the ears, and use glued eyes, nose, and cheeks to add some color to the plate. Draw in your mouth and whiskers. We used a pink pompom for the nose, cotton balls for the cheeks and craft, or “googly”, eyes. My boys chose to have our bunny “look weird and crazy” by having two different sized eyes.
PomPom Painted Eggs
Use a clothes pin to hold a small pompom. We chose to decorate our clothes pin like a rabbit. Now dip the rabbit's head (I mean the clothes pin secured pompom) into the paint. Now you can "bounce" the rabbit painter around a construction paper egg to form a pattern, making sure to change pompoms if you don't want your colors to mix. Let it dry and your finished! (cleanup for this one is a breeze!
"Stained Glass" cross
Cut out crosses from different colored construction paper. Use pastel colored chalk, makers, or crayons to color the cross, using geometric shaped if possible. (This will vary based on the ability of your little artists). You can also add things like colored cellophane to really punch home that stained glass window effect!
Tissue Paper Eggs
Cut out an egg shape along with multiple bright colored strips of tissue paper. Have the kids help crinkle up the tissue paper. This is usually their favorite part. Now carefully bunch up the tissue paper in lines across your egg and then glue them down. The effect makes a beautiful textured Easter egg…or Faberge egg, depending on your goal.
Have your kids make a thumb print in pink, then use their other fingers to make three yellow prints. A black marker to add eyes, beaks, wings, and stick legs to the yellow finger prints, turning them into chicks. Then add eyes, curved legs, bunny nose, whiskers, and a cottontail to your pink thumbprint to make a bunny. Then you have a neat Easter piece of art that your little ones helped make. Since fingerprints are involved, this doubles as a keepsake that you’ll likely horde forever with the ton of other things the kids have made!
Decorated Foam Eggs
Colorful foam sheets are the perfect material for artistic Easter egg projects. Cut out an egg shape from your favorite colored foam sheet. Then use beads, construction paper, or other material of your choosing to decorate your egg. The more outlandish the decorations, the more they will get noticed. Coins? You have the most valuable egg in town. Colored cereal? Now you're really winning!
These are fun and cute activities to make. You always have a ton of those plastic eggs left over each Easter. Why not turn them into something else? It’s an activity that doubles as a decoration. You can draw faces on them or use glue to attach googly eyes. For the pipe cleaner attachments, I cut a small hole in the right spot and let my kids stick the pipe cleaner into the eggs to make ears, wings, carrot greenery, whatever the egg you’re decorating calls for.
T-P Roll Easter Buddies
For this craft, you’ll need some used toilet paper rolls and accessories. At first, I cut my rolls in half…but I didn’t quite like that the bunny and chick heads were the same size as their bodies. So, I trimmed a little off each side, turning the trimmings into the chick wings and bunny ears. With the bunny, I didn’t quite cut the ears all the way off, creating floppy ears. You could just as easily cut them all the way off and attach them as straight ears at the top of the bunny. Then, your kids can add googly eyes and whatever other face accessories they’d like. I chose to recycle a couple more plastic eggs, cutting them to form the chick’s beak and feet. The bunny uses the rounder bottom part of the eggs as its legs.
(NOTE : With any of these crafts that used a hot glue gun, I did the gluing and let my kids watch that part. Naturally, the gun gets a bit hot. Safety first.)
Easter can be a fun time for the whole family, and doesn't always have to be just about jelly beans, and chocolate (although it helps). Enjoy some of these easy crafts, and then make sure to share photos of your creations with us by tagging Fathers of Multiples on social media! Or feel free to send photos to admin@fathersofmultiples.com. We'd love to see them!
For more ideas, check these out!