How to Make an Easter Garden – Natural Small World for Play

We are very excited to celebrate another significant holiday with our family and church. Easter is right around the corner and conversations on the topic occur in our home naturally all the time. This year I suggested to my 5 yo Blossom to create an Easter Resurrection garden. My daughter was chuffed!   After reading and discussing the story of resurrection we thought of elements that should be included in the Easter garden – tomb, rock, cross, and hill. Creating small worlds together with kids gives them the perfect opportunity to think creatively. Children love engaging with little world play scenes – it is a beautiful platform where they can use imagination to play and explore freely.

While working together on a project, it is essential to focus on the process and not so much on the result. It is also necessary to remind children that we need to put our best effort into everything that we do. We talk about textures, discuss what’s coming next and brainstorm ways to complete the task.

With older children, it is great to start the whole project a bit earlier – plant seeds and watch the garden grow.  We decided to speed up the process and went to a garden shop to choose plants for our Easter garden.

Materials we used to make an Easter garden:

• ferns to cover the tomb
• grass
• white flowers
• plastic bowl
• two sticks to make a cross ( we just hammered them with nails, but wood glue or tying sticks together with a piece of string works too)
• pot for a tomb
• garden rock
• garden tools
• soil

Here is what we did:

•  picked a wide plastic bowl – something we had at our disposal. It worked like a charm because the grass had quite deep roots. Next time I plan to use something not so deep, probably a wide garden planter will do a great job – something we can use for feeding wild birds later on.
• scooped plants out into the bowl and placed them around the tomb (a small plant pot).

• filled gaps between plants with soil
• made a cross with two sticks
• decorated the garden with the rest of the elements – placed a cross on top of the hill and rock next to the tomb

We will make sure to water our garden daily and hopefully, it will last for some time. I find it very effective to combine story-telling with hands-on sensory experiences – activities that involve as many senses as possible.

We wish you a wonderful Easter!

easter resources you might find helpful

Easter Pack – Preschool and Kindergarten Learning Folder Busy Book

Easter-themed learning activity pack for Pre-K, Preschool, and Kindergarten children aged 3-5. The Easter learning folder contains printables to create a wide range of hands-on experiences for young children. Students will explore various math concepts, such as odd and even numbers, work with CVC words, practice simple subtraction and addition operations, explore the Easter Story, work on sequencing skills, improve their fine motor, work on storytelling, and develop logical thinking, and so much more.

Here is what’s included:

• Simple subtraction
• Simple addition
• Picture puzzles
• Egg match-up activity
• Number puzzles with odd and even numbers
• Heavy or Light? activity
• Bunny match up
• Small, medium, large soring activity
• Shape sorting activity – (4 shapes – pentagon, triangle, circle, and square)
• Initial, middle, and final sound activity with CVC words
• ABC capital and lower case letters matching activity
• Easter-themed matching activity
• Assemble the Easter Basket activity
• Parts of a chick – poster, label cards, worksheet for coloring, tracing, and independent writing
• Fine motor transferring activity
• Carrot life cycle – poster, picture cards, and student worksheet
• Easter fine motor tracing, coloring, painting printouts
• Resurrection Sunday 3 part cards and student booklet
• Instructions

Purchase the easter Learning Folder here

or find it on Teachers Pay Teachers