Free Resources to Help Your Family Prepare for Easter
We have created a few excellent tools to help your family begin to focus on the significance and meaning of Easter. It won't be long before your kids are inundated with thoughts of bunnies and eggs, so it's better to roll out some truth as early as possible.
First of all, we have published an Easter@Home guide through the HomeLife Center at Johnson Ferry. You can pick up a hard copy of it when you pass by the Center, or you can download it by clicking here: Easter@Home Guide. It has a number of great ideas that can get your family focused on all that Easter means to our faith and our lives.
Anne in our office also found a great idea for creating a small Resurrection Garden with your kids. You can work together and get your hands dirty building a beautiful reminder of both the cross and the empty tomb. But you'll need to get on this one soon as it will be most meaningful if you can set it up in time for the grass to grow and give the whole garden some fresh life. Ideally, you can time this to happen around Easter Sunday. We found this idea at www.wearethatfamily.com. There are some other great Easter ideas there, as well, so be sure to visit the site.
Over the years, our family has often made Resurrection Cookies on the Saturday evening before Easter. Some of my most clear memories of Easter time with my kids involve getting all the ingredients out and hearing them discuss (or even argue about) who was going to put the different items into the mix. If you have never made them before, there are numerous teachable moments through the recipe and even on the morning when you get them out of the oven. Instructions are all over the web, but I found a good explanation on the MOPS website. The link above will take you there.
The Easter@Home guide has step-by-step directions for making your very own Resurrection Eggs, but you can also find them at most any Christian Bookstore or at Family Life, the folks who originally created them. For your preschoolers and younger kids, you can't go wrong at opening up one of these eggs each night leading up to Easter. The guide that Family Life has created for talking through the Easter story is simple and excellent.
With your older children and teenagers, there are hundreds of excellent Bible reading plans that you can download from the web. If your kids can manage it, consider watching scenes from the crucifixion and the resurrection from films like the Jesus Movie or even Passion of the Christ, just to keep things in perspective. It will be troubling to watch, but that's the point. It can potentially make the power of Easter Sunday all that more meaningful.
Finally, many ministries offer devotion guides that are specifically designed to help lead you to deeply consider the meaning and significance of Holy Week. If you have found a good one, please comment below and share it with the rest of us!