Easter, and springtime in general, is a brilliant time of year for getting crafty with your little ones. With chicks, flowers, lambs and eggs all part of the theme – not forgetting chocolate – there’s plenty of fun and colour around to inspire you to have fun.

 

Chocolate nests  

Sometime baking with young children can be delightful, sometimes it can be on the challenging side. It all depends on your child’s age, personality, concentration span and mood. But chocolate krispie cakes are so straightforward – involving no actual baking – that they’re fun to make with all ages of children, and as they look so much like little chocolate nests, Easter is the ideal time to make them.  

Melt 100g of milk chocolate with 25g butter or margarine. Add 1 teaspoon of golden syrup

Stir in 50g of rice cereal or cornflakes until they’re all coated with the chocolate mix. Then spoon into cake cases; you should have enough mixture for 10-12 nests. Press down slightly in the centre of each krispie pile to make a dent, so that each cake is a little nest shape. Pop in the fridge to set, then add one or more chocolate eggs to the centre of each cake.

Golden daffodils  

These pretty and colourful paper flowers can be used to decorate cards or popped into a vase - stick them into plasticine or blu tac to keep them upright if you need to.

Cut out the cup-shaped bits of a cardboard egg carton, paint them orange inside and out and set aside on newspaper to dry. Make a four-petalled flower template from a piece of cardboard and get your child to draw around it on yellow card to make as many flower shapes as you want.  

Then glue the dried orange egg cartons to the centres of your flower shapes to form the trumpets of your daffodils. Sellotape the back of each flower to the top of a green drinking straw  - these form the stems, so the bendy type are ideal.

Bunny faces  

These cute little rabbit faces are on sticks, so your child just needs to hold them up to their face to look like a cute Easter bunny. Add the ears to make an entire bunny ensemble!

Wind the ends of six coloured pipe cleaners – white or grey are best – around a lolly stick, towards the top. Fan them out with three on each side so that they look like rabbit whiskers. Then glue a fluffy pompom – pink is the best – to the lolly stick, above the whiskers. This is the bunny’s nose.

You can make a set of ears to go with this by cutting out a broad band of paper that’s long enough to go around your child’s head, gluing it into a circle, then cutting out two ear shapes and gluing them just inside the band pointing upwards. You can make them look more realistic by colouring the inner parts of each ear pink.  

Wine cork chicks 

These cute little easter chicks are the perfect way to decorate Easter cards for your child to give to family and friends. 

Just dip the flat end of a wine cork into yellow poster paint, then use it to stamp circles onto paper or card. These are the chicks’ bodies. Using just the edge of the cork, make little wings on either side of the circles. When the paint’s dry, add little stick legs with the black felt tip, then cut out tiny diamonds from the orange card, fold in half and glue onto the circles to make beaks.  Then use the marker to draw on little eyes, and you’re done.

Egg painting  

Easter isn’t Easter without a bit of egg painting. Here are two different ways to do it, so you can choose depending on the age of your child and how technical you want to get.  

For younger children, it’s best to hard boil eggs so they’re not too delicate to paint. Once they’re hard boiled and cooled, you can balance them in egg cups to paint. 

For older children, you can drain the eggs, leaving a an empty shell. Make a hole in the bottom of each egg with a pin, then another in the top, and gently blow into the top hole to drain all the egg out through the bottom. This is trickier to do and makes the eggs delicate to work with, but they’ll be light enough so that you can collect branches from the garden, pop them into vases and then hang your eggs from them to make an easter egg tree.

Now you’re ready to paint your eggs.  You can do these as simply or as adventurously if you like, going for just one colour on each egg, or doing a base colour and adding patterns or faces in another colour once the base has dried.  

Easter games 

If you’re having an Easter party, it’s a good idea to have some themed ideas for games up your sleeve.

Easter egg hunt Depending on the age of your child, an Easter Egg hunt can vary in complexity. At its most basic, all you need to do is ‘hide’ a selection of chocolate eggs in bright wrappers around your house or garden and let the children loose with baskets. Just don’t hide them too well, or you’ll be hunting all day! A more complicated version involves rhyming clues, each one leading to a small chocolate treat and the next clue, with a bigger easter egg for each child at the end of the treasure hunt.

Pin the tail on the Easter bunny This great game can be adapted to any theme! This version requires you to draw a big rabbit without a tail on a large piece of paper, blue tac it to the wall, then blindfold each child and let them have a go at sticking on a fluffy pompom tail.

 

Written for the Pre-school Learning Alliance by Siobhan Godwood.