Easter Garden

Here's a fun and meaningful activity you can do this week for Easter. It's called the Easter Garden. It's a great way to teach the children in your life the real meaning of Easter.

To make your Easter garden, you'll need the following materials:

1. a large tin foil dish or baking tray

2. damp sand or peat

3. empty toilet paper roll

4. a large round stone

5. twigs, flowers, leaves, small stones,etc.

How to put it all together:

Fill your tray with sand or peat. Lay the toilet paper roll on the surface, and cover with more sand or peat to make a hill. Leave one end uncovered.

Place the round stone to one side of the hole to represent the stone rolled away from the empty tomb.

Use the twigs, flowers and stones to complete the Easter Garden.

We collected all of our materials outside near our house. Q had a bag of sand which we were able to use, too. When we were all done, this is what our Easter garden looked like:

You can add lots of different things to embellish your special garden. The possibilities are endless!

When we showed Q our project, he and A talked about the twig being the cross, so he broke off a couple of the branches to make it look more like that. Take a look at it now....

We are keeping the tomb closed until Easter Sunday. I'm thinking about surprising A on Sunday morning with a small sign next to the open tomb that says, "He is Risen!" This simple project has already help begin conversations about Christ dying on the cross and His resurrection. Use it in your home, Sunday School classroom or where ever you'll have children this week. It is a wonderful ministry tool that I hope will teach many about why we celebrate Easter.

I found the idea for the Easter garden in this Spring Activity Book that I found at my local thrift store for a quarter.:) We have already done a couple of simple projects out of it and hope to do more.

Have a wonderful Easter celebrating the Christ who died for our sins and rose from the dead!:)