Easter Crafts for Preschoolers

Running out of ideas? Preschoolers on a holiday can be really demanding. Here is a list of Easter crafts for them!

Easter is the time when a whole family spends some quality time together. But with a full house of kids, we need some ideas to animate them too. Here are a few of the most popular activities for kids, especially preschoolers, who don't possess too many motoric skills, but can be very creative, resourceful and productive, making this lovely family holiday even more pleasurable.

The ideas are divided into sections, which can be easily adapted or expanded and there is a comment area in the end where you can suggest one or more crafts suitable for kids from your own experience too.

All used images are Public Domain.

1. Decoration

It's hard to imagine a celebration without a proper decor and Easter is no exception. Your little ones can play bigger or small roles in the process of decoration, but you'll always need some kind of plan, which should be thoroughly supervised and promptly adapted to always changing situations.

There are numerous ways to include preschoolers and here is a short list:

making banners, door hangers, floor, windows and walls decorations
creating a basket for Easter eggs, candy, flowers, (made of paper, wicker, mason jar, egg carton, old umbrella, flower pot, tote bag, ...)
arranging flowers, pick them, select and combine them according to your general guidance, making them from paper, ...
always the most exciting and rewarding part of placing the Easter related elements like Easter eggs, plush toys, plastic figurines around the house
helping at the table setting, the central place for family gathering in most cases

2. Drawing and Coloring

We can't emphasize enough how important is to develop fine motoric skills. Growing child with a developing intellect is much more susceptible to all kinds of stimuli coming with a creative process of drawing. It is known that the largest part of brains controls the movement of hands. With different centers in left and right hemisphere, the creative and analytical ability of our mind is forced to cooperate and support each other, what leads to a creation of new neural networks, thus giving our kids better start for all kinds of learning.

Here are a few examples:

Drawing an Easter Bunny:

You are by no means limited to using coloring pencils or pens. Watercolors are extremely popular in this age group. Nice touch can be an addition of straws - for blowing paint. Another interesting possibility is frozen cubes of paint on a stick, or use the foil instead ordinary paper for a special glowy effect.

Coloring pages with Easter motifs are another popular pastime activity. The Web is loaded with free coloring pages with different difficulty levels. You can even create your own Easter themed sheets and help to make this special holiday weekend truly memorable.

Painting is a step further - if you dye eggs for Easter, you probably already know how to include children in this tradition. To produce something lasting, you can blow the yolk and white out of an egg (make some crepes!), clear (carefully!) the shell with water and mild soap, then decorate it with paints, patterns, and other elements, being limited by your imagination only.

3. Everything Eggs

Dyeing Easter eggs is very likely the most known (and one of the oldest) traditions related to this biggest Christian holiday. Eggs represent new life, fertility, optimism, and abundance. There are hundreds of dyes on the market, but we can find some spectacular options in nature as well:

Onion skins are probably the most known source of natural dye. Depending on the shade of onions and egg shells, concentration of dye and time in the solution, we can create many different reddish or brownish colors. For best results, rub eggs with some oil when the dyeing process is already finished.

Chopped purple cabbage will create bluish or greenish eggs, depending on the color of the egg shells.
Eggs will become yellow if you use ground turmeric (one of the most used dyes in the food industry).
To create the lavender color of Easter eggs, cook them in water with the addition of violet blossoms and some lemon juice.
Beet will give a pinkish look of eggs with white shells.
Walnut shells will color Easter eggs with dark brown tones.

All these natural dyes give you plenty of options to involve the kids, including preschoolers, as active as you want.

So play a bit with the colors, combine them, try to achieve the trendy ombre look by soaking eggs at varying levels for different amounts of time, ...

Apart from obvious ones, there are numerous alternative ways of using Easter eggs:

you can use Easter eggs (with names of guests, smileys with their initials, or even maybe their small portraits) instead of place cards
with an addition of some paper, you can easily transform eggs into bodies or heads of different animals, like chicken or rabbit

When the eggs are already dyed, further decorating (with paper, foil, stickers, Washi tapes, cloth, twine, ...), coloring, stamping, using fake tattoos or glitter glue, ... is possible. A number of opportunities to give the kids a chance of showing their creativity, right?

If you don't want to stay limited to real eggs, you can make some fake ones: from paper, balloons, crochet strings, metallic foil, and other materials. It's up to you how to divide the working process between you and your preschoolers.

4. Games

The basic rule of playing games on Easter (and virtually every other occasion) is to adapt. A number of players and their age are two main categories, but we should always consider as much of their needs and abilities too. The place, where we intend to play is definitely another important thing to consider. some of the games can be played inside and outside, but for all the outdoor activities we should have some kind of backup plan in case of inappropriate weather.

Here are only a few ideas:

Easter egg hunt: apart from the traditional dyed eggs we can obviously use plastic or chocolate eggs, different kinds of candy, plush toys or other small objects which can be hidden. To make things more interesting (and the hunt more demanding) we can organize it in different levels with clues given to solve each level before moving up to the next level, from easier to more demanding tasks. If we have six or more kids in the party, we can split them into two or more groups and add an extra bit of competitiveness.
Egg race: we can arrange a race where competitors try to run from start to finish while overcoming different obstacles at the same time. But running is not enough, it has to be done with a spoon in each contestant's mouth and an egg (instead of real egg you can use chocolate ones or even marshmallows) in the spoon! We can also demand they do that with their legs in bags, or we can organize a relay by making teams. If we don't have enough space for a proper race, the egg could be transferred between the members of each team without hands, only being allowed to touch the egg by noses.
Don't break the egg: this popular game needs at least four kids and an even number of them. They have to be arranged into groups by two, each group having a plastic egg, filled with jelly beans. The object of the game is to toss the egg from one member of each team to the other. When an egg is caught, the catcher makes a step backward and toss the egg back to the kid, who started. Then the new catcher makes a step back and tossing is repeated until the eggs eventually fall down. A team with the longest covered distance wins - a chocolate trophy can be a nice price.
Spring cleaning time: it's a perfect game for small spaces and it can be played by kids of all ages. Basically, you need a lot of colorful jelly beans and they should be sorted by colors. We can do that with one larger bowl filled with jelly beans or with several (depending on the number of children) ones. The winner is the kid who first empties his or her bowl or the kid who managed to find the highest number of red jelly beans or the one who sorted the highest number of jelly beans altogether (instead of time-consuming counting you can determine the winner with a help of the kitchen scale), ...
Up, up, up: this is a typical outdoor game where we need a good weather and a lot of space. Each kid is given a balloon and this balloon needs to stay in the air (by punching) all the time. After a while, we add an extra balloon to each kid and we repeat that until some of them won't manage to keep all the balloons up. The winner is the one who 'juggles' with the highest number of balloons at the time.