Celebrating Easter with your Children

As spring begins it brings new hope, fresh beginnings and bright sunshine and flowers.

I think that spring is one of my favourite seasons to celebrate, and after the last 12 months of lockdown and uncertainty,  hopefully we can now look forward to the future. 

 

 The Willow and Wild Organic Easter sensory resources are perfect for using in so many ways to celebrate Easter, spring and fresh new beginnings.

 

All of these activities use items from their brand new Easter collection. The beautiful sensory rice is delicately scented and smells floral and inviting. The sensory dough is super soft and squishy and the accessories work perfectly with them both.

One of my biggest passions is getting children out into nature and exploring the changes throughout the year. Spring seems to offer so many changes like the brightly coloured daffodils and birds nesting in the trees. 

In this “snack-tivity” we made omelettes using fresh eggs and saved the shells as perfect vessels to start our cress seeds in. Simply add a little bit of soil or wet cotton wool and sprinkle your seeds on top. A few days later you have delicious home grown cress to add to your egg sandwiches!

I love setting up simple sensory trays for children to explore that invite them to be creative, problem solve and develop their fine motor skills. I tried to get a little fancy with this one using the sensory rice to create a fresh spring scene.

Keep in mind this will no doubt be messy in about 3.5 seconds flat!! So don’t worry about making it perfect, rice simply added to a tray and tools added works just as well!! 

Willow and Wild Organic’s sensory dough is one of my favourite items, the new spring colours are beautiful and smell divine!

For this simple set up I grabbed some cardboard from the recycling and drew a very basic egg shape with patterns. I then used the sensory dough and loose parts to add texture and pattern to the egg shape. This is a great way for getting your little one’s hands and fingers moving, which is a really important skill to practise before learning to write. 

These wooden boards from Drawme are also available from Willow and Wild Organic and are great for letter recognition and formation and for a simple and easy to throw together activity I invite the children to use the tools to fill the letter spaces and use their fingers to trace the outline. 

On a recent walk I noticed the birds were collecting twigs and feathers to build nests it was lovely to watch them busily building away ready for their precious eggs and babies.

I got to work building nests using sensory dough and small twigs I found. To make the nests comfy and cosy I added feathers and read about nesting birds in our favourite nature book, My first book of nature by Nicola Davies. 

Pattern making is a great skill for children to learn, it helps them learn to problem solve and predict, I used the egg stamper and sensory dough to make repeat patterns starting off with two designs and then making it trickier by adding more! 

The squirrels have been leaving lots of walnut shells around the garden, I noticed that they floated so using a tiny piece of sensory dough and a twig we made them into tiny little boats. They bobbed around in the tray of water whilst our peg dolls from Fawn and Fall watched. We imagined they were racing their boats on a pond.

I added little leaf sails on some of the boats (this was a little fiddly so better for slightly older children)