Easter crafts for toddlers and preschoolers

Both of my girls love getting creative. With Easter just around the corner, we’ve been busy sticking, gluing, painting and printing and having fun with some Easter-themed crafts.  Here are some of the Easter crafts we’ve been doing lately:

 

Paper bowl birds’ nests

These cute birds’ nests are perfect for putting small eggs in and are very easy to make.  We started off by painting the outside of the bowls brown using a mixture of brown paint and PVA glue. We then stuck small twigs and pieces of brown pipe cleaner on the outside.  The paint and PVA glue mixture wasn’t great for sticking the twigs on though. We found that drizzling glue all over the outside of the bowl was much more effective. It did take a little longer to fully dry though.

Once the outside of the bowl was dry, we turned them back over and filled the inside with shredded tissue paper.  You could also paint the inside of the bowl brown. We left ours unpainted as the shiny surface of the bowl is trickier to paint.

 

The birds are made from small circles of cardboard, folded in half, with a small triangle stuck on one side to make the beak.  We added eyes with a black marker and the girls stuck feathers all over the semi-circle shapes.

 

 

Easter egg potato printing

A lovely simple activity for little ones to do.  I covered one end of the table with lining paper and cut out lines and zig-zags into two potato halves. These were then be painted or dipped into paint to make Easter egg shapes.

Admittedly my girls both seemed to prefer smearing the potato across the paper to actually stamping it on the paper and creating Easter egg prints! We did manage to get a few prints on the paper though!

 

 

Easter-themed “stained glass windows”

This was probably my girls’ favourite Easter crafts activity and kept them occupied for quite some time.  I cut out an egg shape and a cross shape on two large pieces of cardboard and then covered the shaped holes with contact paper/sticky-back plastic.  I then taped these pieces of cardboard to the window, sticky side facing out, and gave the girls a bowl filled with small squares of coloured tissue paper.  They had a lot of fun sticking the tissue paper to the contact paper and making a colourful “stained glass window”.  Once the contact paper was covered, I trimmed the edges. I then used washi tape to tape them back on the window with the tissue-paper side against the glass.

 

Bunny rabbit masks and hats

Another simple paper plate/paper bowl Easter crafts activity.  The masks are made from a paper plate with the middle cut out and cotton wool balls stuck around the edges of the plate with PVA glue.  We made the ears out of craft foam and added pink pipe cleaners for whiskers. We then glued on a craft stick at the bottom so the girls could hold the mask up.  I found that a single paper plate was too thin to hold the weight of the mask with the cotton wool balls.  A second paper plate (with the middle cut out) glued on to the first was needed to make it strong enough for the girls to hold up.

The hat was made in a very similar way. The cotton wool balls were stuck on to a paper bowl and rabbit ears added using craft foam.  The bowls were a little small to stay on the girls’ heads for very long. Some thin elastic would have been quite useful to help with this!

 

 

Paper plate Easter baskets

Our final paper plate creation was a basket to hold small chocolate eggs.  The girls covered the bottom of a paper plate with Easter stickers. Once they had finished decorating their paper plates, I turned them over and drew a cross on the top.  I cut about two thirds down each of the lines, folded the sides up and stapled to create the basket.  A strip of card, decorated with more stickers made the handle.  You could also create a handle from the rim of another paper plate and paint the plate rather than using stickers.

 

 

Once the baskets were finished, we filled them with tissue paper and small chocolate eggs.  The eggs didn’t last long though before they were eaten!