The simple days of drugstore candy-filled Easter egg hunts are now a thing of the past, thanks to Pinterest and social media. Now it’s like everyone needs new Easter egg hunt ideas for toddlers lest their hunts appear lame in comparison.
From adding realistic details like bunny tracks to your egg hunt, to making smashable confetti eggs or turning the whole thing into an adult-assisted scavenger hunt, these novel takes on the traditional egg hunt will keep toddlers happily busy and avoid repetition from other egg hunts they may attend at church or in their community. That's another big difference from our own childhoods, when we enjoyed at most two egg hunts: one at a church and one at home. Now every town center, museum, zoo, or other public space offers its own egg hunt and related activities on the weekends leading up to Easter. By the time the actual holiday arrives, you may be desperate for novelty, too.
In which case, might I suggest that you look at some ideas for adult easter egg hunts? Because the boozy festivities might be just what the bunny ordered after dealing with squealing children and Pinterest worthy projects.
Egg In An Egg In An Egg
This is dead simple. Buy several sizes of plastic eggs and stack them one inside the other. It will take them forever to get apart, and by the time they get to the very center (obviously a Cadbury mini egg), they will be so happy. Toddlers are an easy crowd.
An "I Spy" Egg Hunt
Use the Easter Egg Hunt checklist featured on A Mom's Take or make your own. The point is to borrow elements of the popular toddler game "I Spy" to make your egg hunt longer lasting and more engaging. Toddlers will need an adult's help reading the instructions, but they are sure to enjoy checking boxes as they look for different kinds of animals, flowers, and colored eggs. This approach also turns an egg hunt into less of a free-for-all and more of a focused, deliberate activity.
Redeem Eggs For Prizes, Arcade Style
Instead of fretting over whether to fill the eggs with candy or skip sugary treats entirely, let your kids decide. The Life As Mom blog has a printable system of tokens (they call them yokes) to hide in plastic eggs. Once kids have collected their share of eggs, they can add up their tokens (a bonus counting exercise for toddlers) and decide what prizes to redeem them for. From one yolk for a piece of candy to five for a bigger prize like a beach ball, kids will have to balance their desire for candy with options for fewer, more durable treats. You could also use pennies or tickets instead of the printables to serve as tokens.
If You Plant Easter Eggs, You Get Bunnies
"Plant" easter eggs in a bowl of chocolate pudding. Place in the fridge overnight. (Bunnies have fur and like the cold. It’s a stretch, but they’re toddlers.) The next day, place Peeps bunnies above where the eggs were (that you removed), growing out of the pudding. Magic bunny eggs. And then creepily devour the peeps and the pudding.
Ball Pit Hunt
Use their kiddie pool and fill with a single layer of Easter eggs. They have to find the eggs with treats in them by opening all the eggs. Having done this a time or two myself, I will tell you that the older the toddlers get, the more eggs you’ll need if you want to have a pint of beer while they’re tending to their eggs.
Color & Size Match
This one is great for color learners. Give them a basket full of eggs, and have them separate them by color and then by size. For all the pairs they find, they get a prize. Bonus points for knowing the colors, and learning the sizes big, medium, and small.
Jell-O Egg Hunt
Make a pile of Jell-O eggs and let your little ones go to town with the whipped cream and fruit topping. It makes for a cute picture for the ‘gram.
Magic Map Hunt
I am a Potterhead, so I love the idea of making a Marauder’s-style treasure map of where the Easter eggs might be hidden. Make it meandering, but not too dense, because toddlers get bored really fast.
Scavenger Hunt
Sometimes you are limited on the number of eggs you can hide or the places you can hide them — I know of what I speak, living in a small Brooklyn apartment. Turn the Easter egg hunt into a scavenger hunt. Strategically place clues written on egg-shaped paper around your house, with each one leading to the next. At the end, your toddlers will find their prizes.
Bring On The Pacque
Author and native Louisianan, Ken Wheaton, explains the tradition of egg “pacquing” or more phonetically “egg pocking” for The Takeout. Basically, tradition dictates that a pair of competitors takes a raw — albeit, often decorated — egg and they tap them nose first to each other, and the person whose egg cracks, loses, and the last person with an uncracked egg wins. Toddlers love this game because it’s so dang messy. No one plays this game indoors, but trust me, everyone who plays it, loves it. (I am the reigning champion, and it’s because I cheat.)
0 comments:
Post a Comment