Easter Toddler Activities

There are loads of options for Easter toddler activities to celebrate this time of spring, new life, egg-shaped gifts, and (if you're Christian) the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Toddlers and preschoolers are the perfect age group to have the most fun with Easter celebrations. Here are some ideas to keep your little one busy, happy and above all - creative!

Toddler Craft Activities

Decorating Eggs

One of the most popular children's Easter crafts is dying and decorating an egg. Let your toddler choose what colour they want their egg to be. Then distract them with other Easter toddler activities while the egg is boiling in water that's been coloured with food dye. When it's cool, place in an egg cup and let them cover it with Easter themed stickers and/or collage materials (such as pom poms, feathers, foam or shiny shapes and small pieces of tissue paper).

Painting Eggs

It's a bit messier during the process but then looks neater than a collaged egg at the end. Save some of the clean up by putting the egg cup in a thin plastic bag. Cover the top edges of the bagged egg cup with Vaseline or a thin layer of grease (and also inside if there's any gaps). This helps the egg to be easily separated from the bag and placed directly into the egg cup for display when dry.

Painting Egg Boxes

This may sound a little strange but toddlers love it. Painting the different compartments also aids their hand-eye coordination. I discreetly chuck them afterwards. The toddlers don't notice because they do art for the pleasure of the process rather than for the product.

Egg Pictures

Cut an egg shape out of card and let your toddler design a multi-coloured Easter egg.

Lamb Collage

Cut a lamb shape out of card or construction paper and let him stick cotton wool on it. I would recommend that can you only hand your toddler the cotton wool after he's finished gluing and then quietly put the glue away. Trust me, finding cotton-wool stuck to the glue stick and mixed with the glue is not pleasant and gets there oh-so-easily.

Easter Bonnet

Toddler craft activities needn't be hard. A great Easter toddler activity is simply sticking little chicks, plastic eggs, fake flowers etc to a straw hat. These things are easy to find around Easter time. Fabric glue is more effective with this craft. When it's dry your children could have an Easter parade to marching band music. Or they could create their own band after making some home made musical instruments too.

Children's Easter Card Ideas

This is an ideal activity for 1 year olds.

1. Fold a piece of A4 card (letter size card stock).
2. Cut an egg shape out of card - make the egg slightly smaller than the folded card. Cut the egg in half, following a zig-zag pattern so the egg looks "cracked" open.
3. Let your toddler create a collage on the egg pieces.
4. Draw the head and half a body of a chick about 3" tall and let your toddler colour it in yellow.
5. Glue the chick onto the folded card, with the bottom egg piece glued underneath the chick and slightly overlapping so it looks like the chick is sitting "inside" the egg.
6. Punch a hole in the remaining egg piece on the left hand corner next to the jagged cut edge. Attach the top egg piece to the folded card on top of the chick, using a split pin to create a hinge (no glue). When the top piece is swung round on its hinge, the chick is revealed!

A Spring Day Collage

Let your toddler stick cut-out pictures of rabbits, lambs and flowers on a folded piece of green A4 card. Hey presto, you have a Easter card! Easier still... you could use Easter stickers.

Easter Outdoor Games for Children

Since toddlers won't be able to run far without dropping their hard boiled egg, it would be less frustrating for them to just 'practise' rather than race. Let your toddler compete with his own records and just have fun.

The Good Old Easter Egg Hunt

Easter wouldn't be Easter without egg hunts. You can hide eggs inside the house (perhaps confined to one room to make things easier) or if the weather's nice you could hide them in the garden. For a group, a small local park could work too.

As a child, I hunted for plastic eggs and larger egg-shaped containers with gifts or healthy snacks inside instead of chocolate eggs. In the USA it's popular to hunt for coloured or decorated hard-boiled eggs - often ones the children have made themselves (see Decorating Eggs and Painting Eggs above). The children could receive gifts based on how many eggs they found, but the fun of finding eggs is enough in itself for toddlers.

Baby Animal Hunt

A variation on the theme using your child's model animals (they don't actually have to be baby animals). By making a pictured list of them as well, you make a more varied problem solving activity that your toddler would gain more from. It's best to only use a few animals when you're adding a list to the activity.

A younger toddler would find matching the animals to the pictures easier if you took photographs of the models individually, whereas it would be beneficial for older toddlers or preschoolers to use photographs of the real animals from magazines or the Internet.

Let your toddler find the hidden animals and stay close with the list. When one is found, ask what it is that they found and talk about the similarities and differences of the model and picture pair. This is an excellent activity to promote child speech development.

More Matching Activities

Help an Animal Find its Baby

Children from 2 to 4 years old like this activity. This game is commercially available but it can be made at home using photos of animals from magazines or the Internet.

You need a few pairs of clear, preferably whole body pictures of animals and their babies. Your made homemade game would be more durable if you laminate the pictures or cover them with clear sticky-back plastic. This toddler activity could also be played with model animals if you have matching adult and baby sets. You lay the cards (or models) out on the floor or on a table, face up and mixed up, and let the child match the grown-up animal with the baby animal.

When he wants to do the activity, first demonstrate with a running commentary but let him take over as soon as he's willing. It's also a great time to mention that many baby animals are often born around now and that we are in the season called spring etc.

An Easier Matching Activity

Here's the first step on the matching ladder - matching identical objects. To go along with the Easter theme you could collect, say, pairs of toy chicks, rabbits and plastic eggs (or any safe identical objects). Try and catch your toddler's attention by playing with the objects in a clear space. When he's watching, show him how match them up and talk about what you're doing. Then playfully mix them up and invite your toddler to join in.

I hope you enjoy these Easter toddler activities as much as I know your child will!

Race with egg and spoon from Easter Toddler Activities to Seasonal Toddler Activities