Easter Children’s Books and Activities

Easter is a wonderful time to celebrate both growth and new beginnings. It is a time to grow closer together through celebrations as a family or with your students in your class. Whether you are religious or not, there are fun and memorable stories to read aloud with your children or class (as well as an activity for every book).

Read on and enjoy 10 great Easter books and activities AND get to the end for a few religious books and activities to celebrate Easter as well!

1) Rechenka’s Eggs By Patricia Polacco

Rechenka is a talented Egg painter who helps a little injured goose, but when the goose breaks all of Rechenka’s beautiful painted eggs something magical happens. Activity: Any Easter egg decorating activity would go well with this book. You could read it and then: Decorate/Dye eggs Color Egg Pictures: Either print off coloring pages from online or print a copy of an outline of an egg and have the students experiment with line and design. Have the students use a pen to draw stripes and designs to fill the entire egg (in the end after they are done with the pen, it should look like an adult coloring page with lots of small spaces that need to be filled. Then let the students color in the lines with color pencils. Colored Rice Egg art: Print out a picture of an egg. Dye rice different colors overnight. Then have students put a little Elmer’s glue on their paper and glue the colored rice to create a design on their egg. 2) The Great Eggscape By Jory John

Every morning the Eggs leave their carton and play in the grocery store together. Everyone but Shel that is...but it's lunchtime and his friends still aren’t back! Will Shel leave the carton to see if he can help? Activity: Easter Egg Hunt: Read this story before you have your own Easter egg hunt. Break up a worksheet into an Easter Egg Hunt: Have an Easter egg hunt in your classroom around Easter during a lesson. Have practice problems written on paper and place them in eggs. Hide the eggs around the room. Students find the eggs and complete the practice problems (on their own, in small groups or as a class). Make an Easter Meal: Read the story and then have your children help you hunt down all the ingredients at the grocery store that you need to make your Easter treats and meal. 3) The Berenstain Bears and the Real Easter Egg By Stan and Jan Berenstain

Brother and Sister are excited about the candy and gifts they will find in the town Easter Egg hunt...but maybe Easter is about more than just candy? Activity: Plant flowers: Talk about how Easter represents new beginnings and growth. Have your students or children help you plant a seed or garden. Jelly Bean Guessing Game: Bring a jar of jelly beans and have your students/children estimate how many beans are in the jar. Teach students what estimation means and then after everyone guesses, pour them out and count them. Give the closest estimate a prize. 4) Ollie’s Easter Eggs By Olivier Dunrea

Ollie and his friends die eggs and then Ollie hides them! Will his friends be able to find them? Activity: Ducky, Ducky, where’s your Egg?: This game is just like “Doggy, Doggy, Where’s Your Bone?” One student leaves the room. Another hides the egg. Then the other student comes back into the room and the whole class sings: “Ducky, Ducky, where’s your egg? It’s gone, where’s it fled?” They sing that quietly when the student is walking away from the egg’s hiding spot and then they sing it louder as the child finds the egg. Potato Egg Stamps: Cut a potato in half and cut chunks and lines in each half creating a design. Then students can dip the potatoes in different colors of paint and use it as a stamp to make Easter egg pictures. Fill eggs with paint and then throw them for a splatter painting activity: Talk about primary and secondary colors with your students. Crack just the tops of eggs and leave most of the shell intact. Fill each egg with different color paint. Let your students/children throw the paint at a big piece of butcher paper or canvas and enjoy the splatter. You can also talk about what abstract art is and how it affects design. 5) The Bunny Who Found Easter By Charlotte Zolotow

All he wants is another bunny friend...he heard there are bunnies on Easter...but where is Easter? Activity: Spoon Rabbit Puppets: Take a white plastic spoon. With a sharpie, draw a rabbit face on it. You can glue construction paper ears to the back of the spoon and tie a ribbon around the spoon to make a bow tie for your rabbit. Foam Cup Bunnies: Use a white foam cup and either use sharpies or construction paper to make a rabbit face and ears on your rabbit. Easter Bunny Handprint: Have students trace their hand out on a piece of colored paper. Then cut out the hand. Next, cut the middle finger off and then fold the pinky and thumb down (they become the paws). The other two fingers are the ears. Draw a face and details on the ears to create a bunny rabbit. 6) The Velveteen Rabbit By Margery Williams

All the rabbit wants is to be a real rabbit. A sweet story about a boy’s love and how love can change the way we see ourselves and others.

Activity: Sock Bunnies: You will need a clean sock, something to fill it with, two clear elastic bands, a small ribbon, good scissors and a sharpie (you can also have 2 googly eyes, a pink pom-pom, and a white pom-pom and fabric glue or a glue gun). Fill the sock with fluff, rice, cotton balls or tissues. Tie the fluff in with one of the clear elastics (leaving about ⅓ of the sock without fluff for the ears). Tie another elastic around the part of the sock that has fluff to make the head. Then tie a ribbon around that elastic making a little bow tie for the rabbit. On the top part of the sock, cut the sock in half down until you reach the elastic. Cut each tip at a diagonal to make it look like two ears. Then you can either draw the face on with a sharpie or glue googly eyes, a cotton ball nose and a cotton ball tail.

7) Duck and Goose: Here Comes the Easter Bunny By Tad Hills

Duck and Goose are looking for a great hideout so they can see the Easter Bunny! Will they catch him? Activity: Peek-a-boo clothes pins: Cut out a square piece of paper and fold it in the middle. Draw an Easter Animal on the square. Then cut out a small shape of a tree, bush or egg (if your animal is a chick). Cut the bush in half and glue the top of the bush to the top of a clothespin and the bottom to the bottom of a clothespin. Then on the back of the clothespin, glue the top of the square to the top and the bottom of the square to the bottom. The square should fold when the clothespin is closed, but then when you open the clothespin the egg, tree or bush opens up and reveals the little square animal picture glued to the back. 8) The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes By Du Bose Heyward

A little country bunny has always wanted to be an Easter bunny, and then she was given the most important job of all! Activity: Houses for Peeps (made from graham crackers): The baby bunnies in this story worked hard to make their house clean and neat. Make a house a gingerbread or graham cracker house for little peep bunnies or chicks that they can decorate and make beautiful. 9) The Biggest Easter Basket Ever By Steven Kroll

The mice in the town are on a mission to make the biggest Easter Basket ever! Activity: STEM challenge: Give students materials to make their own Easter basket. See who’s can hold the most weight without breaking. You can set criteria and only let students use certain materials or limit the amount of time they can spend depending on the group of kids. Paper bag baskets: Students can also decorate paper bags and make their own beautiful “Easter baskets” for an Easter egg hunt. Painted Egg Cartons: Give each child an egg carton to decorate and paint and fill with Easter eggs. 10) Here Comes the Easter Cat By Deborah Underwood

An interactive book about a Cat who wants the Easter Bunny’s job, but maybe Cat can help the Easter Bunny after all! Activity: Little Easter Animal Puppets: Use cut up Toilet Paper rolls, cut up egg cartons, paper plates, popsicle sticks or pipe cleaners and have students decorate the materials with markers, paint and construction paper and more to create little animal puppets. 11) The Good Egg By Jory John

Shel is a good egg! He just wants to be good, but all the other eggs in his carton aren't making good choices and now he is stressed! What can he do? Activity: Kindness Jars: This could be a social/emotional activity or a religious activity. On small strips of paper, write good choices you can make, ways you can help others and things you can do to fill peace. Then have students cut out paper designs and tape them to a mason jar. Paint the jar and let the paint dry. Once the paint is dry, take off the paper design and see how it leaves that design shape on the jar. Students can take out each slip of paper a day at a time and do the action on the paper. Once all the papers are gone, they can use the jar as a candle holder and remember to be kind every time they use it. 12) The Easter Egg By Jan Brett

From the author “The Mitten” this is a sweet story of a little rabbit who visits his family and enjoys seeing all of the eggs his family decorated. Now he just needs to make his own beautiful egg. Activity: Paper Plate Chicks: Students will decorate two paper plates. The first one they must decorate to look like a chick or bird. On the second plate, they can decorate it to look like an Easter Egg. Cut the Easter Egg in half to make it look like it was cracked in half. Then using brads, put the egg on top of the bird paper plate (the brad should connect the top and the bottom). Then students can rotate the egg to cover the baby bird or they can move the two halves making it look like the egg hatched.

13) Happy Easter, Davy! By Brigitte Weninger

Davy and his family just learned that the Easter Bunny brings human children presents! Who will bring the rabbit family presents for Easter? Activity: Tootsie Pop easter bunnies: Use construction paper, a small styrofoam ball, googly eyes and a ribbon. Flip the Tootsie Pop so it is upside down. Stick the styrofoam ball over through the stick. Then glue two bunny ears to the remainder of the stick. Glue the googly eyes to the ball to make a little rabbit face. Add a bow between the head and the body of the rabbit. Lastly, glue little rabbit feet to the bottom of the Tootsie Pop. 14) Hopper’s Easter Surprise By Kathrine Siegenthaler and Marcus Pfister

A beautiful watercolor story about two rabbits who want to be just like the Easter Bunny!

Activity: Salt Dough Egg Ornaments: Salt Dough is a very fun and easy craft for kids. To make it you must add 1 cup water, 1 cup salt, and 2 cups flour. Mix together and mold into whatever objects your students want to make. If the students want to keep playing with the dough it will stay soft for a while if kept in a plastic bag. If the sculptures are left out they will dry within a day or two. Then students can color or paint the sculpture (they can make eggs to decorate or a bird’s nest or any Easter thing they wish to make).

15) Happy Easter, Little Critter By Mercer Mayer

Little Critter tells us about Easter Traditions. This is a great book to read with students to prepare for some of the issues that might come up during a community Easter egg hunt. Activity: Easter SunCatcher Mobiles: Use pipe cleaners to create an Easter design (egg, bird, butterfly, sun, etc.). Then tie a string to the pipe cleaner so you can hang it in front of a window. Cover the pipe cleaner with tissue paper and lightly tape it with clear tape. The sun will show through the design like a stained glass window. 16) Llama Llama Easter Egg By Anna Dewdney

A Llama Llama story about Easter Traditions. Great rhyming and pictures! Activity: Easter Mosaics: Have students create a picture of their favorite parts of Easter using torn paper that they glue to a plain white piece of paper. 17) The Night Before Easter By Natasha Wing

A story of Easter told as a parody from ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Activity: Easter Egg String Ornaments: Poke a hole in an egg on the top and bottom. Then blow the egg out of its shell, while keeping the shell intact. Then, cover the egg in Elmer’s glue. Take a piece of colored string and wrap it around the egg making a design (make sure the string crosses over itself several times). Let the glue dry and then carefully crack the egg and you will be left with the hollow inside where it used to have the egg for support. You can do the same activity with yarn and a balloon. 18) We’re Going on an Egg Hunt By Laura Hughes

The rabbits are looking for eggs in a parody of “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”. Interactive flaps and practice with counting! Activity: Animal Charades, Parade or Dance Party: This book is meant for younger students. Have them read the story and then pick different baby animals and have the students act out those animals, dance like those animals or create a stuffed animal parade that they take around their house. For Older Kids: Have them play a minute to win it where they have to dress up like an animal in one minute and then everyone has to guess who is what animal. Animal Sounds: Older kids also love the game animal sounds. One person stands in the middle of a circle, blindfolded. All the other students sit quietly in the circle. The person in the middle spins and points to someone randomly and says the name of the animal. Then the person they are pointing at has to make a sound that they imagine that animal would make and the person in the middle guesses WHO is making the sound. If they guess wrong the person claps once and the person in the middle must spin and point to a new person and say a new animal. If the person in the middle guesses right then the person they guessed must come into the middle of the circle and get blindfolded...everyone switches seats while the person is blindfolded and the game continues in the same way. 19) The Itsy Bitsy Bunny By Jeffrey Burton and Sanja Rescek

This book is a parody of, “The Itsy, Bitsy Spider” about an Easter Bunny who wants to hide eggs for a little town.

Activity: Sing Book as a Song: Teach students the tune of, “The Its, Bits Spider” and then have them sing the book as a song. To make it even more interactive, you could have the students come up with hand gestures to go with the song/story.

20) Read the Story of the Resurrection in the Bible

The story from the bible is a wonderful way to teach children about the true meaning of Easter. Activity: Hide the Easter Story in Easter Eggs: Get a dozen plastic Easter Eggs. Place a scripture verse and a small symbol to remember the meaning behind the verse in each of the eggs and have the students open the eggs, read the scripture and learn about Christ and the Resurrection during this time of year.

Check out the Holiday Writing Bundle, for lots of differentiated activities for every holiday! OR find more great booklists HERE!

Related Questions: How do I find these books? It can be tricky to get a hold of good children’s books (especially with libraries being closed during this time of social distancing). Many of these books can be ordered on Amazon, but if you do not have time to order the books before Easter, you can also find read-aloud versions of the books on Youtube. Where can I find more book lists and holiday activities? Check out my other blogs for more holiday book lists and activities. You can also look at my holiday resources on TPT!