Hosting an Awesome Egg Hunt This Easter
Can you believe that Easter is just around the corner? Hard to believe the festive holiday involving Easter baskets, bunnies, and egg hunts is almost here! I have had my fair share of both participating in and hosting Easter Egg Hunts – both as a child and now with children of my own. Here are a few tips on How to Host an Awesome Egg Hunt This Easter.
Creating the Invitation
The first step in hosting an egg hunt is to figure out the date, time and location. The first place I look is to the boys’ school or extracurricular activities. You want to make sure you plan it on a weekend where there are no school activities or sports events. I like to create it in the afternoon – around 1:00 – 2:00 pm. This gives you the greatest chance of increasing your participants, as it typically falls after games and other activities that may take place during the morning. You may also consider Sunday in the early afternoon (the weekend before Easter, not on Easter Sunday).
Once you have your dates and times figured it out, you can start inviting family and friends. Word of mouth is always a great way to invite people, but I also like to do the invites via Facebook or Evite. You may also want to create a paper invitation or buy paper invitations to mail to family and friends
Enlist the Help of Participants
I like to host parties and get-togethers, but for something this big, I like to enlist the help of the parents. When I hosted the last Easter Egg Hunt, I asked each family to bring $5.00 to contribute for pizza and then a dozen filled plastic eggs per child. I provided the difference for the cost of the pizza; a dozen filled eggs; craft supplies; drinks; appetizers; and decorations. It has been my experience that most parents want to help in some way. Having parents donate filled plastic eggs and money for the egg hunt is a great way to include everyone and to take some of the stress off the host.
Plan a Schedule of Activities
When I hosted the Easter Egg Hunt, I had an idea of how long I wanted it to last and what activities I wanted to include. The activities included different stations with different activities. We had a table for the kids to color Easter coloring pages. There was a second table with a foam Easter egg craft. There was a third table for the kids to decorate their paper bag that would hold their plastic filled eggs. I like to have at least one parent at each table helping with the craft – or the child’s parent helping him or her. The remaining tables were for the kids to eat at when the pizza arrived. After finishing the crafts and eating, we would head out to the grass are for the egg hunt.
Starting the Easter Egg Hunt
While the children are participating in the crafts, I have a couple of parents go out and hide the eggs or spread them out in a big open area of grass. This way, the egg hunt is ready and waiting for the kids once they are done crafting and eating. The last time we had an Easter Egg Hunt, we spread the eggs out on a grass area and let the kids run for them. They had a great time and were so excited about the goodies they found!
Have Extra Plastic Filled Eggs for After the Egg Hunt
Having little kids participate in Easter Egg Hunts, it has been my experience that the older ones almost always end up with more filled Easter eggs than the little ones. What I like to do is make sure that I have extra filled eggs on hand for those kids that didn’t leave the egg hunt with much in their bags. I like to fill them with Hershey’s chocolate eggs, Goldfish crackers and other goodies that I know kids of all ages could eat and enjoy!
Take Lots of Pictures
One of the things that I have found is missed at Easter Egg Hunts is the lack of pictures. This is not because of a lack of caring to photograph the event, but because the host is usually busy directing participants to the different activities and making the transitions smooth from one activity to another. I like to have at least two different people helping to take pictures. They then forward the pictures to me and I put the pictures up on the Facebook Event page – sharing them with all of the participants!
I can’t wait to host our next Easter Egg Hunt! What do you think makes a great Easter Egg Hunt??
I received product samples from Hershey’s as part of this campaign.
All opinions expressed in this post are 100% mine.
That looks like so much fun, I always loved egg hunts as a kid!!!
when my 2 oldest kids were little, we used to make a huge awesome deal about easter, it was so much fun. add two more kids and I find I’m more exhausted than creative. I like the idea of doing it with a group and getting everyone to participate. Happy Easter.
So fun we host Easter dinner and do an egg hunt in our yard before dinner, it is so much fun!!!
I think kids love to find the eggs so much that you don’t have to put toooooo much inside as long as there are lots of eggs to find.
I’m always intimidated about planning events. Thanks for giving so many detailed and clear tips on how to pull it all together and make it a success!
We always have an egg hunt on Easter Sunday at my husband’s grandparents. We have a large range of children and the parents are always trying to make it fair for everyone. I think color coding them maybe be a good idea. I love your idea of having other parents donate money or filled eggs for the hunt. It gives a variety of treats plus it doesn’t break the host’s bank! Great post!
I haven’t taken part in an Easter egg hunt in forever and I miss them. Looks like so much fun!
I almost feel silly commenting on this post right now since it’s almost Halloween currently, but when I was browsing thru your blog posts this easter egg hunt one brought back so many special happy memories of all the various creative ways I made up easter hunts for our 5 kids while they were growing up over the years.
Also about 6 months after my now husband proposed to me and gave me my ring, I really surprised him because he had no idea but I saved up my money and bought him a beautiful and very meaningful symbolic wedding ring I knew he’d love and around easter I set up a romantic easter egg treasure hunt and in each egg was a romantic rhyming clue regarding our love and relationship and each with a rhyming clue leading to the next egg and the final one led him to our bedroom where there was a little stepstool for him to set on surrounded by rose petals and lit candles and he was like “what?!” what’s going on? and there was one more egg sitting next to it and I picked it up and knelt down by him and handed him the egg and his wedding ring was in there and I proposed BACK to him (even though he’d already proposed to me and we’d set a date) he was so touched and awed and told everyone how special that was. : ) Now 10 yrs later we still feel like we are on a never ending honeymoon. : )