Our Easter Celebration!

On Friday we had so much fun celebrating Easter!!!

Right away in the morning I set up a painting station with big white paper, glitter paint,  Easter eggs, and marshmallows for bunny tails!

I also put out a new Easter themed sensory table.  The kids could use the bunny tweezers to look through the paper grass and sort the mini eggs by their colors...

 Here we did more sorting by color at the light table with translucent Easter eggs, tweezers, and jelly beans! 

 For breakfast I made whole wheat honey bunny bread!  The kids could choose what part of the bunny they wanted to eat, and what topping they wanted.

We also made sticker bunny masks that I bought from Oriental Trading.  These were AWESOME!  They were super easy to put together and the kids LOVED them!

 Hoppy Easter!!!!

For our next activity I read Jan Brett's book The Easter Egg.  This is a book about an Easter egg decorating contest.  The illustrations are beautiful!

 We decorated our own Easter egg.  For this activity I wanted it to be completely open-ended and allow for creativity.  I told the kids they could decorate their egg any way they wanted.  Their choices were to color with crayons or markers, paint with leftover glitter paint, decorate with items from the collage box, or do this swirling paint idea with shaving cream.  I sprayed shaving cream in a cookie sheet pan, and squirted a few paint colors over the top...

 We swirled the colors together with a Popsicle stick...

 Then we pressed our paper Easter egg in the concoction...

 We scraped off the shaving cream with a ruler and there was a beautiful marbled design left from the paint!

 A lot of the kids did the shaving cream idea and then painted over it with glitter paints...

 Gluing items from the collage box...

(If you have not tried these glue bottles from Lakeshore, you must!  They are AWESOME and they NEVER get clogged!)

 I have to laugh here...she found more string in the collage box to cut.  She LOVES to cut yarn! :)

 I love to see all the gorgeous works of art!

For our next activity I set out Easter cookie cutouts and a variety of play-dough...

 I love our alphabet and number stampers from Lakeshore Learning!

I gave my two school-age kids the job of stuffing and hiding the Easter eggs this year!  They were so thrilled!!!!  They felt so important!  I was happy to make them feel special, but also relieved I had some help!

 Here is the start of our Easter egg hunt!  The big kids did an AWESOME job hiding the eggs!  Each child got to find 6 eggs!

 I wish I would have recorded it! I loved to see hear their excitement and see their faces when they found an egg!

Back inside I set out some Easter themed dramatic play toys, and a Velcro bunny catch game.  The kids loved reenacting the egg hunt while I prepared lunch.

 Our Easter themed lunch table!

 Bunny shaped PB & J sandwich, carrot sticks with Ranch, vanilla Greek yogurt in a silicone muffin liner with Easter sprinkles, grapes and strawberries with a bunny pick, and organic bunny fruit snacks!

Before story time we did this little activity.  I placed these printed out pieces of paper in 7 Easter eggs...

• Twitch your tail like a bunny.
• Wiggle your nose like a bunny.
• Hop in a circle like a bunny.
• Wiggle your ears like a bunny.
• Dig a hole with your front paws like a bunny.
• Hop in a line like a bunny.
• Pretend you are munching a carrot like a bunny.

 A few volunteers opened one egg at a time and we acted out the words on the paper...

 Wiggle your ears...

 This is such a funny photo!  J is trying REALLY hard to twitch his nose like a bunny!

 More twitching noses...Ha!

 I read my two favorite bunny books for story time!

For snack time I made bunny cupcakes in frosting that looked like green grass!

 In the afternoon I set out a few more games!

This is our Lakeshore Learning "Feed the Bunny" fine motor game!

 We made TALL bunny towers!

 I also bought 3 wind-up chicks and 3 wind-up bunnies from the Dollar Store.  The kids love playing with these, and they are good for fine motor skills.  These worked really well, and the kids giggled a ton while they hopped all over the tables!

 The last hour of the day was spent watching Dora's Easter Egg Hunt on DVD.  I think we were all pretty exhausted from a fun filled day!  I sent the kids home with some yummy white chocolate popcorn "Bunny Bait!"  I told the kids they could eat it if they wanted to, but it was really intended for the parents...ahem, I mean the Easter Bunny!!!