Posted on Monday 11 March, 2019
Easter provides a lot of opportunities to use your printer in craft activities for your kids.We have chosen to take a secular view of Easter, so bunnies and eggs predominate, but some of the ideas and techniques could also be applied in a religious context. Indeed, some of the sites mentioned also feature religious images.
Easter Egg Hunt
For many families, especially – but not exclusively – those with younger children, an egg hunt is one of the highlights of the season. And if you're having an Easter egg hunt, you may need to provide participants with a basket so nobody collects more than their share. "Once your basket is full, come and sit down, and then you can eat an Easter egg."
Commercial Easter egg baskets can be on the large size, but if you make your own you can print the design at a smaller scale to suit your needs.
You can get away with printing a basket template onto normal 80gsm office paper, but if you have something heavier – even 100gsm – you'll get a better result.
Printable Easter Egg Basket
Here's a template from kispotthat's simple enough for quite young children to make with minimal supervision. If they are OK with scissors, they could probably do it almost all themselves. You might print the template in black and allow the child to colour it in with crayons or textas, or allow them to add colour before printing by using the paint bucket tool in their favoured painting program.
Party Planning Center's Easter basket is a slightly more complicated design, but its three variations keep things reasonably simple for the least adept while allowing the more skilled to take things progressively further. This is another JPEG template so it would be possible to change the colour scheme before printing.
We thought The Craft Train's Easter bunny baskets were particularly cute. They call for slightly more advanced scissor skills, but they should be within reach of most primary school kids. If your child needed an additional challenge, you could suggest adding whiskers or replacing the tail with one made from cotton wool.
If your kid is up for something a little more involved than "cut out and stick together," Carrie's printable Easter baskets require some paper weaving. (We found several designs that simulated weaving, but they seemed to lack style.) We liked the idea of printing the template in black and white onto the back of patterned paper. If you didn't have any suitable paper, print a design that you like so it fills an A4 page (heavier paper is again recommended). Wait for it to dry, then print the basket template on the other side.
Bunny Ears and Masks
You'll probably need to buy some heavyweight paper (say 200gsm) or thin card If you're planning to make printed bunny ears or masks for or with your child. Normal office paper is too floppy and not really strong enough. Another approach is to glue the printed sheets onto thin card such as an empty cereal box. Either way, consider using adhesive tape to reinforce the mask in the areas where you plan to make holes for the string or elastic.
Making Easter bunny ears is an easy project, even for preschoolers. DLTK's Crafts for Kids offers one of the simplest designs for bunny ears. Two versions of the template are offered, one pre-coloured, the other a blackline version that can be decorated by the child.
Kidspot takes a different approach, offering a bunny ears templatethat can be printed, decorated and then attached to a paper plate that's been turned into a ring – think in terms of the brim of a hat. The same site also has a design for ears that can be attached to an Alice Band. Whether you like your bunny ears to be floppy or standing up, The Mama Zone has a free rabbit ear template for both styles. Once printed, coloured and cut out, they can be attached to a simple headband made from thin card.
Mask Spot's Easter bunny mask is fairly straightforward, though younger children might need help cutting out the eye holes. The blackline version gives kids a chance to pick their own colour schemes. We suspect most will go for crayons or textas, but we converted the PDF document to a JPEG image and then used a paint program to colour that in. The program's paint bucket tool didn't fill right up to the line, but as long as we selected high quality and high resolution when converting the file, the final result looked just fine.
First Palette's version of bunny mask has a slightly less goofy appearance, but the irregular outline is somewhat harder for littlies to cut out.
If you favour the Easter bilby, Mother Natured has an attractive, pre-coloured bilby mask template that's ready to print and cut out. Earth 1st's version of bilby mask is a simpler, one-piece design.
Colouring Sheets
There must be thousands of Easter-related colouring sheets spread around the web. Here are some of our favourite collections that include Easter bunny pictures.
Crayola's selection are generally suitable for older children, and some – especially if printed at reduced size – might appeal to adults who still have the colouring bug. Much the same can be said for Super Coloring's collection, which also includes a blackline Easter chick mask.
The Organised Housewife has curated a selection of Easter colouring pages.
Our Worldwide Classroom offers a pack of bilby-themed Easter printables. It includes puzzles and other activities as well as colouring sheets.
