10 Ways To Celebrate The Resurrection Of Jesus With Your Kids
With Easter just around the corner, Christian parents are looking for ways to celebrate the resurrection of the Jesus with their kids.
As Christian parents we may have seen the ways that Easter has become commercialized. With this commercialization, we notice more and more people drifting away from the real reason for the celebration of Easter. In fact, for many in our society, they don’t even realize that Easter is more than a holiday involving a bunny rabbit and getting us in the mood for spring weather!
If you want your family to skip on the Easter Bunny and instead focus on the resurrection of Jesus, then check out these Christ-centered ideas to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus with your kids!
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Christians Should Celebrate Easter With Their Kids!
As Christians, our hope and salvation is placed on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The apostle Paul said, ” if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” (1 Corinthians 15:17)
Because our Christian faith rests upon the fact that Jesus did raise from the dead to defeat the grave, sin and death, we should spend time celebrating His resurrection!
Not only should we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, we should invite our kids to join us. They need to know what we are celebrating and why it is such a BIG deal. But let’s be honest, after a day spent keeping our kids alive and feeding them, we can tend to run low on creative ways to introduce important conversations to them.
Also, our kids may need more than a conversation, they might enjoy and learn much better through actually doing something to help them understand what we are celebrating.
So, with that in mind, check out these ideas that help you get creative as you teach your kids more about the resurrection of Jesus.
Ways To Help Your Kids Celebrate The Resurrection of Jesus
Here are ideas that will help your kids celebrate the resurrection of Jesus during the Easter Season!
Design a Holy Week calendar together.
A few years back when we had our first daughter, I wanted to find a way to teach her about Easter week in a hands-on fashion. She was only a young toddler so I knew it needed to be visual and simple. I found this great idea to make a Holy Week calendar. Each day we added an item to our calendar, read some more from her favorite children’s Bible, and then did a quick activity. It usually took no more than 15 minutes a day.
The Holy Week calendar has now become a yearly tradition in our family. We look forward to the week beginning on Palm Sunday and leading up to Easter. During those first delightful 2020 quarantine days, we even made a HUGE version of the Holy Week calendar to hang in our picture window. People could see it as they walked by and we saw a few people stop and point which the kids loved!
The best part about the Holy Week calendar is that it has grown and expanded to fit the needs of the different ages of our kids. We can do some more in-depth readings and conversations with our older kids while letting the youngest ones continue to just enjoy the simplicity of a few quick minutes each day.
Host An Eyewitness Account Bible Time.
Every account of Easter morning is a little different because each of the Gospels is told from the view point of a different eye witness. Pick a few days during the Easter season and read the different Gospel accounts.
If your kids are good sports, you can even have them act out the parts of the eye witnesses. Create detective notebooks and let them interview the eye witnesses. Enjoy digging through the Gospel accounts to guess how the eye witnesses might have answered the questions.
Discuss why they maybe noticed what they did. For instance, why Peter and John have different reactions when reaching the tomb or why some disciples share about walking with Jesus.
To help your kids better understand how people have different accounts, ask your kids to give you some key details they remember from a big event in your family.
For instance, in our family we visited a zoo to feed the giraffes. Our daughter can tell you what we fed the giraffes and how Daddy lifted her up. Our son doesn’t remember those details but he does remember going to a zoo and hearing a lion roar. Same zoo trip, totally different recollections of details.
Help your kids to understand that eye witness accounts of the resurrection are more reliable because the accounts have differences in them.
Bake some empty tomb rolls.
When you have kids, you tend to spend a LOT of time in the kitchen keeping them fed. Consider taking some of that time when you would normally be making a normal set of dinner rolls or cookies and instead turn that time into a celebration of the resurrection.
Check out this recipe that will help you create edible versions of the empty tomb. Your kids will love eating the treats! Extra bonus points if they can share them with family and friends at Easter. These empty tomb rolls could start a conversation where your family can share about the resurrection of Jesus with others.
Share the good news of Easter with others.
Yes, we need to be sharing the Easter story with our kids. But sometimes they can tend to hear us talking and fail to remember it. (Or is that just my kids?)
One great way that we can help our kids to remember the Easter story is by having them help us to share the Easter story! Perhaps your family can make little Gospel baggies to share at a local shelter. Place a Gospel tract, a Easter candy, and some creative or helpful item in each bag. Then you and your family can hand them out while you serve a hot meal to those in need.
Another option would be to pick a few people and create a basket of items to bless them. (Consider a struggling family and create an Easter basket of practical items such as laundry soap, rolls of quarters, paper towels, etc.) Include with your basket of blessings a Bible with the Easter story marked out and some Easter crafts they can enjoy doing together as a family. (Maybe make them some Resurrection rolls too!)
Your kids will always remember the time when they celebrated the resurrection of Jesus by blessing others. It is a great way to help them live out the Christian faith in a practical way and to reflect Christ’s love to others. Best of all, you will be doing it together as a family!
Plant a Resurrection garden in a pot.
Spring has many of us itching to get outside and garden. If you are like us, the Easter season signals we are getting soooo close to gardening time. While you wait for the weather to become nice enough to plant an actual garden, turn your garden attention towards making a Resurrection garden in a pot.
There are many ideas and ways to do this so find a design on Pinterest that your family likes. Then plan how to make it happen. Weather permitting, you can set your Easter garden outside on Easter morning to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus!
Study the Resurrection evidence as a family.
As your kids grow older, they will likely have questions about the resurrection. Spend the Easter season as a family studying the evidence for the Resurrection. Address many of the common questions that arise about the resurrection such as:
- Was Jesus really dead when he was placed in the tomb?
- Did the disciples just move the body of Jesus?
- Could the disciples just have looked in the wrong tomb and thought it was empty?
- Were the disciples hallucinating to alleviate their grief over the death of Jesus?
Rather than let those questions scare you or undercut your child’s faith, address those questions head on.
Find good resources such as Frank Turek’s videos over at Cross Examined YouTube channel or read The Case For Easter by Lee Strobel. Pick questions and look up answers together as a family. Your kids will benefit from knowing the evidence for the resurrection. Plus it will help them learn how to work through hard questions about the Christian faith in the safe and nurturing environment of your family. Talk about a win-win!!
Read books about Easter together.
Let’s be honest, in our family, every holiday is a reason to read books! That might partly be because we are huge book lovers, mingled with the fact that my husband is an English teacher turned librarian.
Reading truly just runs in our veins. (And yes, we have an entire room in our house that is a dedicated library despite the fact that we have a small house for our large family. Room for books is just a necessity in this family! 🙂 )
So, when I say read books for Easter, I mean, that no matter what age you are, you can read books.
Check out the list below of some of our favorite Easter related books and see if one might work for you family. If reading aloud to your family sounds daunting. Find a book on audio and let it play in the car while you drive to church or to Grandma’s house.
If you homeschool, you can pick books that you can align with your homeschool curriculum during the Easter season. Have fun with it and let the books bring the resurrection of Jesus alive to your family.
Memorize 1 Corinthians 15:3-4-the first Christian creed.
The earliest Christian creed is believed to be recorded in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4. Read the history about the earliest Christian creed to your family and then set aside the Easter season to purposefully memorize these Bible verses. It will be a joy to know that you are joining with your earliest Christian brothers and sisters in celebrating the resurrection of Jesus through spoken truth.
Play an Easter Trivia Game.
So you have read the stories about Easter. Your family has baked empty tomb rolls. Everyone know 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 by memory.
All that is great. Now have a fun trivia night. Create a Jeopardy board or make a game board with cards they can draw to ask trivia questions. For every question they get right, have them earn points or candy or rights to choose the next family read aloud book. Pick prizes that your family will want to actually work towards winning.
Basically, let your creative juices go crazy. Make a trivia game involving all the Easter info that you can find. This is a great way to see what your family has retained and to help enjoy learning more.
One quick warning, don’t make this a boring test. Keep it fun and light-hearted. If your family struggles with being too competitive, make the trivia game cooperative. In that case, you all have to work as a team to answer the questions. Cooperative trivia games can be fun and will retain good family relationships at the same time! 🙂
Paint your own set of Easter Story Rocks.
Okay, if you and your family are the arts and crafts loving crowd, you will love the idea to paint Easter story rocks. These are a delightful, hands-on creative way to recount the Gospel story with your kids through the medium of paint and art.
Just don’t ask to see me do this because art is NOT my strong point! 🙂
Explore Easter hands-on with a set of Resurrection Eggs.
Are you or your kids tactile learners? Do they need to feel and see something to help them remember what you are saying? Then grab a set of Resurrection Eggs!
These are fantastic tools to help put the story in front of your kids in a whole new way. Plus it will be easier for them to remember the key parts of the Resurrection account for future reference!
Your Turn
Share your family’s favorite ways to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus in the comments below! It is wonderful when we can help each other find creative, fruitful methods to help our kids come to know more about the beauty and truth of the Easter season.
Thanks for stopping by!
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