Yesterday I blogged about God’s Kids Worship’s “A Big Basket of Easter Songs.”
The kind people at God’s Kids Worship want to give one away… to you. Nice of them, huh? It’s a $29.98 value that you can have by simply retweeting the following message:
Win God’s Kids Worship: Easter Songs resource pack for your #kidmin and get cool & creative Easter ideas. Click here: http://goo.gl/ohZxv
Don’t spam twitter though, only tweet the message one time a day. Leave a comment below as well telling me the most creative thing you’ve done for your kids at Easter.
So, I’ll put your name in the “virtual” hat for every tweet you post (remember, only one per day) as well as one time for every comment you leave (you can post more than one comment, but it has to be a different Easter idea for it to count an additional time). If I like your idea the most, I’ll put your name in the hat 5 more times. I’ll then draw out one name and send that person a copy of the resource. Sounds like fun, huh?
Contest ends on Saturday at 11:59 PM! Ready… Set…. GO!!!!
Last year, our church did the regular easter egg hunt, not very exciting right?? Well we decided to spice it up and hide “golden eggs” Everyone was excited to find the “golden egg” We reached out to hundreds of kids and had fun doing it!
The first year I was at Momentum, we were meeting at the local theater & didn’t have any grass to hide eggs. Rather than have the kids searching behind movie posters and the arcade games, we stuffed hundreds of plastic eggs with prizes and candy, put them in one section of the main foyer, then covered them with hundreds of bags of plastic Easter grass so the kids could still “hunt” them. It worked. The kids had fun. But I thought we would NEVER get all the grass up off the carpet…..
For the last couple of years we’ve done a “Breakfast with the Easter Bunny” followed by an egg hunt. We do continental style breakfast and let individual kids or whole families pose for a FREE 5×7 with the Easter Bunny. Our student pastor does the dressing up and one of our amateur member photographers takes the pictures. We’ve had a really good turn out. Then I do a straight forward gospel presentation before the egg hunt. We have several thousand eggs and add to the number each year. We normally have more eggs than the city-wide hunt and a lot fewer kids! Of course we have other prizes to give away as well.
At the church where I previously served, we did an Easter Egg hunt around the corner from the church at the elementary school and always invited the community. The last year I was there, we did the usual prize eggs for the kids by age groups; giant chocolate bunnies, stuffed lambs, etc. But we took the largest part of the prize money and bought 4 gift cards to a local restaurant and drew 4 names from the registration box, and awarded the parents of those names a gift card. We explained it was our way of thanking them for bringing their kids to the egg hunt. We couldn’t have done the event without those parents who brought the kids to participate!
Wish I could add something original, but our church has done their egg hunts as well. Hoping for something neat this year – somehow have fun and effectively communicate the awesomeness of Easter / Resurrection Sunday. It really goes beyond eggs. For our family, we do the “empty tomb” rolls for breakfast and often are awoken at the crack of dawn as my wife plays “Easter song” and similar songs loudly while rejoicing for the day. We keep hoping that the new “Jotham” book will come out for Easter/Lent but it keeps getting delayed.
I was faced with no grass and all parking lot. What’s a kid’s pastor to do on Easter Sunday? We used every classroom on the 2nd and 3rd levels; blasted music in the halls; divided up the age groups; and covered the floors with Easter grass, eggs, little prizes, and big pieces of candy. Tons of fun – big hit!
We’re in Ohio. It usually snows on our Easter Egg Hunt. EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. So we cram 5 or 6 craft tables in our Fellowship Halls and hide eggs in our classrooms and we have a devotional in the sanctuary. Sometimes we find an egg hidden in a toybox in July 🙂 This year will be my first year as the Children’s Ministry Director and I am really looking forward to creating some special Family Time Moments!
One year we had the kids decorate wooden crosses made from paint sticks. Then the kids ‘planted’ the crosses on the front lawn so when people left church, there was a ‘sea’ of crosses to remind them of the Jesus’ sacrifice. (not my original idea – found online somewhere but can’t remember where.)
One of my favorite things that we’ve done at our church for kids and families was a ‘family friendly’ Maundy Thursday service. Our tradition at the time was to have one Maundy Thursday service in a room with chairs set up around a cross that was propped on its side on the floor. At the end of the service, people were invited to move to the cross and pray there. It was always a somber, quiet, moving worship experience which most adults loved and looked forward to every year. But we noticed that many parents would stay around afterward and take their kids to the cross and talk to them about what we were doing, what we were remembering.
So one year, we planned 2 different experiences, one specifically for families with pre-school/elementary aged kids. It was a self-guided experience which began outside where the kids got to pet a donkey and hear about Jesus’ entry through Jerusalem… continued through the story of Judas, etc and ended up in the room with the cross on the floor where families could wash each others’ feet, talk about and participate in the Lord’s Supper, and pray at the cross. It was amazing to see parents leading their families this way. Also made the Easter celebration on Sunday more meaningful for everyone.