Spring into Easter!

Easter, unlike Christmas, can be tricky to talk about with children and harder for them to understand. A baby being born is a much more attractive story than one of crucifixion and death. However, there are many traditions which we can engage with and explain the thinking behind them, one of which is making an Easter garden. My daughter made this at school and I love the simplicity and creativity of it with one side depicting the crucifixion and the other the resurrection and new life. An easy but effective project that depicts the story.

Easter garden

There was also an Easter bonnet competition at school that they didn't win but we had fun designing and making them! My youngest again wanted to depict the real Easter story so she wrote the different parts of the Easter story from Palm Sunday to the Resurrection on egg shapes and illustrated them. More opportunities to talk through the symbolism of new life through lambs and eggs and er....bonnets!

On Palm Sunday we held a Messy Easter service at Stopsley Baptist Church, as usual I turn to Pinterest for inspiration! It was so busy I didn't get a chance to take many photos but you can look at the ideas on my board here. Or download my activities planner. The resurrection rolls were very popular as was the egg rolling painting but my favourite one has to be the Easter Story box which is a brilliantly simple idea from here. You retell the Easter story using the figure and the decorated box, finishing with the empty box and the risen figure, so easy for all ages to understand! 

The girls and I also made some decorated Easter jars to give to their teachers to thank them for all their hard work at the end of term. We all enjoyed doing this and sourcing the different things to make them. We cut up some chick cloths for the covers, used some fabric tape to go round the jar (both from Tiger) bought some Haribo spaghetti for the 'grass' added some eggs, a chocolate bunny and carrot! So cute! Finished off with a great free printable label from here.

We then of course did lots of baking over the Easter holidays, experimented with making a simnel cake and hot cross buns (both from Nigella's Feast book). We were quite pleased with our simnel cake (although a blowtorch would have made it look better!) and we chatted through the significance of the 11 balls of marzipan to represent the disciples (minus Judas!)

The hot cross buns however were a different matter, they do indeed look very hot and very cross! I think the yeast I used was past it's best, not able to lift the dough from it's heavy state to being light and airy. They didn't taste too bad but they certainly didn't look great! 

  

And so as we move from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, the unpalatable nature of Jesus' death for us becomes sweet forgiveness as we celebrate His resurrection, new life for us all if we accept it for ourselves. Something that looked like all hope had gone that turned out to be the most amazing act of love ever! 

"God loved the people of this world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him will have eternal life and never really die."    John 3:16

It's been a while . . . . but here goes - Easter!

Hi all, remember me?

I've kind of been a little behind in my blog posts (just a bit!) and silent on all of yours but have enjoyed reading what you've all been up to. But you know how  it is, you think I'll just wait until I finished the latest WIP or when I've got a better photo or something better to share and before you know it, it's weeks then months and then it gets harder and harder to start again!

So, here goes . . . I got in my head that I wanted to make an Easter wreath. We like to celebrate Easter in this house as we do Christmas so decorating the house is all part of it.

Anyhoo! I found a few spring bits I liked the look of, got the glue gun out, found an old wreath in the. loft (yes really!) and spent a very enjoyable 10 minutes gluing away, hung it on my front door and (I've waited a long time to say this!) TA-DA!

Easter wreath

I'm really quite pleased with it! We try to make a big deal of Easter as we think it's more important than Christmas as far as our faith is concerned! So we decorate the house and do family activities to help the girls get to grips with different parts of the story and so on.

Easter Jesse Tree

This is our version of an Easter Jesse Tree that we used at Christmas with some great ornament downloads from here and now at Easter to tell the story of the life of Jesus. We've brought some life to it courtesy of some Phoenix Trading butterflies! It's made out of some packaging materials and is only a feature until we get around to pulling the ceiling down in this room and decorating!

Christmas Jesse Tree

And here is my youngest's prize winning Easter bonnet (apologies for the poor photo - another excuse not to post!) her Daddy and her made for a competition at school. She was very adamant that it had to depict the real Easter story but then rather reluctant to wear it once the sticks were stuck in! But, very happy with her chocolate prize!

So, there we go! I've done it, made my first attempt at a comeback (!) hope you've enjoyed it and I'll try not to leave it so long next time! I'm on my way over to all you lovely people now to be brave enough to leave a comment! 

Happy Easter everyone!