Ready for Easter

We have been talking about Easter all week in school.

We’ve read books about the Easter Bunny. About Easter Eggs. About where both of these traditions originated. And about Jesus and the Resurrection, of course.

It has been a good week. We’ve all learned a lot. I found lots of fun activities to do addition and counting using plastic Easter eggs and small candies (like M&Ms and Jelly Bellies), and I added in a bit of number and shape recognition to some of them.

We used up some left-over-from-St.-Patrick’s-Day poster board to make Easter bunnies.

I often get out textural elements for the girls to add to their crafts, like cotton balls to make the bunnies fluffy (or puffy paint made with shaving cream and glue). Miss often rejects these outright. She knows what she wants, and in this case the cotton balls were not part of her vision. Lass thought it was fun to add the cotton balls. Until it wasn’t. I love their different approaches to things.

Today we dyed eggs.

We talk about measuring and color mixing and all sorts of fun stuff when we do this one.

* Note: Last year I thought it was a great idea to use whisks to dunk the eggs in the dye. I even bought a second whisk this year since one of the ones I used last year didn’t work for this purpose very well. At the last minute I decided the whisks were sort of a pain (getting the eggs in and out of them was kind of messy, it was a little bit hard to get the eggs far enough into the dye, we could only do one egg at a time for each girl, etc.) and that the girls were old enough to do just fine getting the eggs out with spoons. I was right, and am glad I skipped the whisks this year.

I used more food coloring in the dye this year. We used brown eggs that I buy from a friend who has her own chickens, so I wanted to dye to be extra vibrant. I love how they turned out.

We got a bit messy. Some fingers got dyed. Especially Lass’s, since she kept sticking her fingers into the cups to get her eggs out.

She was so eager to get her eggs in and out of the cups. She dyed four eggs green (her favorite color) before Miss pulled one of hers out of the dye, I think.

They had a lot of fun. Miss said, “I think the Easter Bunny with love these eggs.”

Speaking of the Easter Bunny, he has been here tonight. He tied yarn to the older girls’ door knobs, which will lead them to their baskets in the morning.

We have their baskets and eggs hidden in separate rooms so they will each have a chance to find the same number of eggs. Miss is a little bit more focused in her searching and finding, so we didn’t want Lass to miss out on eggs (and their contents) if Miss found most of them. Daddy hid Miss’s in the office.

We are ready for tomorrow.

I was all flustered for a few days earlier this week trying to figure out the logistics of doing Easter Bunny stuff with the girls and making it to church on time at 9. I considered doing the Easter Bunny stuff all on Saturday, hiding the eggs/baskets during nap time, or somehow running in to get it done while my husband stayed out in the car with them after church. Ultimately, I decided to take advantage of the fact that the church holds Mass at several different times during the day. We’re going at 11, so we’ll have plenty of time to get everything done and be ready to go on time tomorrow. Easy.

Happy Easter!