Easter Games Your Whole Family Will Love

Encourage the young guests at your Easter celebration to run for their candy and hunt for their eggs!

By replacing fresh eggs with jelly beans, you re-invent a classic Easter spoon race. And you can also mix the traditional Easter egg hunt up by turning it into a word game. Should the weather not cooperate, you can easily bring both activities inside.

Jelly Bean Spoon Race:

Divide your young guests into two teams, asking each to come up with a fun Easter-appropriate name. Give each team a basket already filled with jelly beans. (Basket size and quantity of jelly beans depend on how challenging you want this race to be.) Establish a Start and Finish line; place the full basket where the race starts and two empty baskets at the race's end. Ask teams to line up single file behind the starting line and give a (relatively large) spoon to each of the first runners.

When the starting whistle blows, runners fill their spoons with jelly beans and race to the finish, where they'll drop the jelly beans into their empty baskets. Any jelly beans fallen in transit should be picked up and returned to the spoon by the runner. (If you're playing outside, you might skip this part if it's too hard to find small candies in the grass.) Then runners head back and pass the spoon off to the next in line. This continues until all the jelly beans have been transferred. A fresh batch of jelly beans can be awarded to all finishers when the race is over!

Easter Egg Word Puzzles:

Gather your plastic eggs, but instead of (or in addition to) filling them with candy, you'll be including letter clues. First, decide on an Easter-themed message. "Happy Easter!"is simple and basic, but you can think outside of the Easter basket with sentiments such as "Welcome Spring!"or "Chocolate Bunny."

Once you have your phrase, use stencils - or go freehand - to cut those letters (in a size that will be large enough to work with but still small enough to fit into a plastic egg) from construction paper or cardstock. Even easier would be to buy a set of craft foam letters and select what you need. Enclose one letter in each egg and hide the eggs in the play area. Set the kids loose with baskets and have them return their finds once you know they've located all of the hidden eggs.

The group can then put their heads together to assemble the letters in the correct order to read their Easter greeting!