Easter Egg Shenanigans!

As part of our family fellowship initiative this year, I wanted to do something REALLY FABULOUS for Easter this year. We had done tiny little through-the-church Easter egg hunts before, but I wanted something GREAT to really bring in the community and involve families in the awesomeness that is Easter!

SO, in striving toward that goal, we had a community-wide Easter egg hunt on the Saturday morning before Easter! It was (really really) cold, but we had it outside anyway- the eggs were not too hard to find! I set out every obstacle I could find from our craft closet to make some of them trickier, but honestly, I think egg hunts are harder for the hiders than they are for the hunters! We tried our best:

Even so, most of the older kids had a very easy time finding their eggs. In retrospect, we didn't even need this cute little preschool area, because even the "harder" ones were way too easy! How do you make it harder to find brightly colored plastic eggs in an open field?! But seriously, I want suggestions!

In an effort to make it a bit more fair, each child was allowed 1 egg of each color, but there were also larger multicolored eggs ($1.50 for 8 at Meijer!) that served as "bonus" eggs. They were allowed to keep any of the bonus eggs they found! We tried to hide those a little better, but again... Way too easy :/

Anyways, after finding our eggs (in retrospect, it was a good thing that it didn't take too long to find them, because it was SO CRAZY COLD!), we shepherded everyone into the family center for more activities!

Each person got a coloring book, which you can upload here (or make your own- it was super easy!). Each page asked them to open one color of egg. I got this amazing idea from Ministry-to-Children, who has their own free coloring book too! I had actually used those prizes and books last year, so I wanted something fresh for this year. :) The materials I used to fill the eggs were:
Green: Palms
Blue: Silver chocolate coins (the cheapest I found were on Amazon)
Orange: Candy cross bracelets from Oriental Trading
Pink: Nothing!
White: Cross eraser from Oriental Trading (I know Ministry-to-Children uses these, too, but they are just SO AWESOME I couldn't resist)
Purple: Bubbles
Yellow: "He Lives" stamp from Oriental Trading



The bonus eggs were filled with candy - definitely a hit with the kids!

We also had other activities for the early finishers! We had egg dyeing:

I made the dye myself out of vinegar and food coloring using this recipe. SUPER easy and WAY cheaper!! I also hard-boiled all the eggs the night before by baking them in a muffin pan. What?! I had no idea you could do that until I found this on Pinterest. Seriously though, it was SO much easier and faster and I only cracked one egg!

We had "pin the tail on the Easter bunny," for which we used this giant bunny that my sister drew by hand! Isn't she the best?!

Outside, another helper was running relay races - the bunny hop (using a big garbage bag to make sure we didn't walk, since I couldn't find potato sacks anywhere), and an egg race (they had to race while balancing a hard-boiled egg on a spoon).

It was definitely a hit! I liked having it on a Saturday morning because it pulled in more of the community members who might not want to brave church on Easter Sunday. Even though next year I hope it will be a bit warmer, this was definitely a successful fellowship event!