Easter Ideas

Easter seems like a holiday more deserving of a bigger celebration and I'm not talking about more chocolate bunnies and eggs, even though those are delicious too.  It's taken me a while to do much at all for Easter besides dye eggs and do a little egg hunt around the house.

But as my life feels a little more manageable, here are a few things we've started doing that I hope will help my children think about the meaning of Easter a little bit more.

1.  For the week or two before Easter, we sing an Easter hymn at the beginning of our family scripture time.  Then for our scripture reading, we read about the last few days of Christ's life, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.  Maybe after Easter we'll read in 3rd Nephi about his appearance to the Nephites.

2.  Two weeks ago (3 weeks before Easter), we had a family home evening lesson about Christ and then for our activity we created a Calvary's Hill, Empty Tomb Garden.  I got the idea from here.  Our wheat took a while to start growing so don't believe it when it says it takes 9 days for the wheat to grow.

I used a 9" pie pan instead of a planter base and I also used a smallish plastic cup instead of a little flower pot.  Fortunately I already had wheat berries and potting soil so it was a pretty easy activity to put together.

This is what we did for our activity two weeks ago:

We placed the cup on top of some gravel in our pie pan.

We covered them with some potting soil.

 

We put the wheat berries on top of the soil.  We probably should have put on more so our grass was more plentiful.

 

We put a thin layer of potting soil on top of the wheat berries.

Then we waited and watered.  We used a spray bottle to water it several times a day.  This is the most critical step.  It needs constant moisture.

After two weeks, here is what it looks like:

 

You can see it's a little sparse on top but there are some tiny little sprouts trying to come through.  It was hardest to keep the top moist so that's probably why it's slower.



I trimmed the grass in front and put a big rock to make it look more like the tomb.

3.  On the day before Easter we will be dying boiled eggs.  I also want to do the project I read about here which involves blowing eggs, writing the names of Christ on the eggs with white crayon, and then dying them.  You take the decorated eggs and hang them up on a little Easter tree.  This would have been a good activity to do a few weeks ago but I didn't plan ahead.  Also, I'll try to simplify my activity a little from what they did.

Here is another link that looks promising (and a little overwhelming):

http://www.mercyrivermusic.com/2015/03/how-to-celebrate-easter-holy-week/