Easter – Matea & Hinko family adventures

Easter is the biggest Christian Holiday on which we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the tomb on the third day after his crucifixion. Easter is a holiday without a fixed date – it changes every year according to a lunar calendar. It is celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Apart from religious aspect it gives a lot of opportunity to discuss with your kids lunar calendar, spring, etc.

You might wonder why are eggs and bunnies connected to this religious holiday? There is no certain answer, but we know that eggs have been in various pre-christian cultures a symbol of life. Many of those cultures have thought that the world begun with an enormous egg. Early Christians decided based on connections of eggs to life that it would be a way to celebrate Christ’s new life after resurrection with eggs. Easter comes during spring and celebrates new life. The Christian meaning of new life through Christ and a general emphasis on new life are different, but the two gradually merged. Any animals – like the bunny – that produced many offspring were easy to include.

During this Lent we have been reading children Bible on daily basis so kids could hear various stories from Jesus life and get to know their culture. We have painted eggs with various techniques, and used the coloured eggs in various sorting activities, counting them, etc. If you are looking for some Easter themed Montessori activities you can find lots of them here.

This year a big hit in our house was colouring eggs using shaving foam and acrylic paint (we got inspired from artfulparent). Natalia would drop two colours of acrylic paint in the shaving foam and then used paintbrush to draw something creative and used it to decorate styrofoam eggs (today also real cooked eggs, just for that we used food colors). We have also used to same technique to make nice paintings (which turned out by accident to have shape of birds, butterfly and fish;) 🙂

Also spring time is perfect time to introduce some botany to your little ones:) Natalia has planted rzerzucha (traditional kind of garden grass that is eaten on Easter in Poland and some other european countries) and watered it every day. We used an old tetrapack package from milk instead of a pot, which teaches how we should always try to recycle what we have at home;) Later on she has decorated the tetrapack by painting. In grandmas garden she planted this week various flowers, and we discussed the life cycle of plants (just very basic in easy words, from seed to flower).