Messy Church Craft Share - Easter

Image used with kind permission

It's Easter crafts galore in this edition of Messy Church craft share. I realise that for many the Easter crafting season may be over already but just in case you wanted to do some more then here are some ideas! 

As you can imagine, Easter is a very special and important time in the church calendar. It is a time of hope, new life, repentance and joy. We celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the new life which that can bring. And of course, we celebrate the new life shown in Spring warmth (ha!) and new growth. We tried to convey some of these messages in our Messy Church crafts. Some are specifically Christian, others are more general. Please feel free to use any of these ideas with your family or children's work.

Edible Easter Garden

This is far and away our most popular craft. I got this idea from my lovely friend Tina from uni, and I don't know where she got it from! 

 There are a lot of components, but some you may already have in your house and if you are doing it for a crowd then get a conveyor belt production line system going! The garden is assembled inside a large takeaway container (I bought mine in Bookers) and is made up of:

• Rice, put in a lidded box with a squirt of green food colouring, then shaken to coat all the rice. Obviously this bit isn't edible!
• A Coco-Pops path
• Iced Gem flowers
• A muffin hill
• Matchmaker cross - glued with edible glue bought in a craft shop
• A brownie tomb - using mini brownies cut in half
• Fondant icing grave clothes
• Cookie stone...rolled away!

Add caption

Each one looks a bit different but that's the beauty of it!

I believe this is a wonderful way for children to remember the Easter story in a multi sensory way.

Painted Eggs (taken from Messy Church)

In order to make life a bit easier for myself I bought some polystyrene eggs from Yellow Moon for the children to paint. They used normal ready mix paint in a variety of colours and different paint brushes to use. We found it handy to rest the eggs on milk bottle tops for both painting and drying. We made sure each child's name was on the bottom of the lid because inevitably some get left behind and we have to reunite them with their owners!

Decorated crosses (from Messy Church 2)
As I was buying the eggs I spotted some wooden crosses on sale and decided to snap those up instead of cutting out 50 or so from card....! The children decorated them with felt tips, tissue paper and sequins and then wore them round their necks with pride for the rest of the session!

Tissue Paper Flowers (taken from Messy Church 2)
This is such a simple and easy task. Just take a few squares of tissue paper, pinch them in the middle to make a point and stick the point in the end of a straw. Secure with some sellotape, then tease the "petals" of the flower out a bit. A nice way to celebrate the colour Spring flowers bring after a deary winter.

Big Picture - Lambs
Each month we try to do a big picture that can go up on display in our hall for church folks and visitors to see. It is a nice way of showing families that we value their creations as well!

First of all an amazing lady called Rosie painted a wonderful background on lining paper for us, then we filled it with sheep! We drew around our hands on black sugar paper, then stuck on cotton wool and wobbly eyes. Our thumbs made the sheep's head and our fingers the legs. I think this might be one of my favourite crafts, it looks so effective!

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get any pictures of the children doing their sheep but you can make out their little handprints clearly. I also encouraged them to look at their handprint in amongst the "flock" and remember that they are part of the Messy Church family.

When the crafts were over and the queue to do the Easter garden died down we went into the church for the celebration. It is always difficult to do the Easter story sensitively with children without glossing over the key elements of the story. I used pictures to bring the story some meaning and I hope I was able to help them understand the message of hope, happiness and new life in Jesus that Easter can bring.

We also gave the children a gift. You may have seen the "Real Easter Eggs" in supermarkets this year. They are from the Meaningful Chocolate Company and aim to celebrate the Easter story along with the joy of eating chocolate! Each child who came today got one of these eggs, which also comes with a story board and stickers so they can remember the Easter story. It was a real blessing to be able to give them this gift and I hope it has a positive impact on them to receive it.

What Easter crafts have you done this year? I'd love to see some.... I can store up ideas for next year ;-)


Please note that I have had to change my comment settings to registered users only to stop incessant spam. This is only relevant to those commenting on mobiles or tablets - computer users can still comment on Disqus as normal.