Easter Activities to Boost Literacy

Easter is March 31 this year. To get ready, here are several ideas for boosting literacy at home. Next week I’ll have a bunch of craft ideas.

Easter Egg Scavenger Hunt

This is really fun. We used to take turns creating scavenger hunts for each other. Try using some inside family information in some of your clues!

• Gather 6-12 plastic Easter eggs. 
• Place a clue in each egg, each clue leading to the hiding spot of the next egg. 
• Example: Find an egg in a place in the kitchen that’s hot. The egg found in the oven could say, Find an egg hiding in someone’s slipper.
• The final egg can have a clue to an Easter treat.

Word Searches

You can find Easter word searches online but creating your own is a better literacy idea.

• Brainstorm a list of Easter words. Stuck? Click here.
• Give each family member a piece of graph paper to create his own puzzle.
• On the graph paper, write the letters of each word in the squares. Capital letters work best.
• Fill in the unused squares with random letters.
• Exchange searches.

Crossword Puzzles 

• Brainstorm a list of Easter words and their definitions (clues). Or let everyone come up with her own clues. The simplest clues are fill-in-the-blank sentences: We like to ___ for Easter eggs.
• Give each family member a piece of graph paper to create his own puzzle.
• Lightly plot each word on the graph paper, in pencil, criss-crossing the words.
• Once all the words have been plotted, heavily outline only the graph squares you used.
• Write out your clues to correspond with the across and down words.
• Carefully erase the words.
• Exchange searches.

E-A-S-T-E-R Words

Using the letters in EASTER, create other words. Examples: sat, tear, rest… If you want, you can make it a contest to see who gets the most words. You can also give extra credit for longer words.

CARDS

Easter cards can be fun to make. These sites will give you some ideas.

Easter Stationery (PDF) 

Crafty Crow

Kid Spot 

Paint Chip Easter Card 

Easter Chick Card 

SCIENCE

Easter lends itself nicely to science experiments. Check out these sites for some ideas. Very cool!

Steve Spangler Easter Science 

Easter Science Projects 

Dying Easter Eggs with Natural Materials (YouTube demonstration) 

This site has more Easter ideas.

Children’s Educational Activities and Classroom Games for Easter 

Just thinking about getting ready for Easter makes me smile. How about you?

Gail