Looking for ideas on what to do special this week as we wait for Easter. We do have one book, Easter by Jan Pienkowski that I plan on reading several times this week. Anyone do anything creative or special to teach your kids about the real meaning of Easter?
This month we’ve been reading straight from the scriptures about the life of Christ on earth. Last night we read the Lord’s Supper for Passover, followed by the Passover account in Exodus. This week we’ll read a little each day of his arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection (planning to finish by Saturday night). I will have our children bible pictures for the 3 yr old to look at as she listens but other than that just my bible to read. We call it His resurrection so as not to confuse with Easter (bunnies, eggs).
We have used a set of “Resurection Eggs” to tell the story of Jesus’ final week from Palm Sunday – Easter morning. We did this for the first time when my oldest was 2 and they love it. If you’ve never seen these before, it is basically a set of a dozen plastic easter eggs, each of which has a small “symbol” inside as a part of the story. You can buy them, but I made my own set and we have used readings out of the Catherine Vos story Bible (although you could read the corresponding passages from a real Bible as well.) If anyone is interested I am happy to post the items I used and the list of stories for each.
We have also done weekly during Lent (so a little late for this year) these readings by John Piper with candles http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/articles/lenten-lights – sort of a similar idea as doing an Advent wreath at Christmas time. I felt convicted a few years ago about how we made a bigger deal out of Christmas than Easter in our family, so we have been attempting to simplify our Christmas traditions and try to incorporate more spiritual meaning into our Easter (we’ve never done anything with the Easter bunny or anything like that, just didn’t do much at all.)
I downloaded the Shining Dawn Nature study idea book mentioned in that thread and it has a lot of neat ideas for tying nature study in with the study of Jesus’ last week in the Bible. We are using a couple ideas from this this week, and will refer back to it again in future years because there was too much there to do it all at once.
I felt convicted a few years ago about how we made a bigger deal out of Christmas than Easter in our family, so we have been attempting to simplify our Christmas traditions and try to incorporate more traditions with spiritual meaning into our Easter (we’ve never done anything with the Easter bunny or anything like that, just didn’t do much at all.) – so I’d be interested in any other ideas anyone else has to share as well.