I was a little behind on being intentional with Easter this year. I like to try to do things throughout Lent to help prepare my heart and the boys’ hearts for Easter. But honestly the week after HopeSpoken I could hardly keep my eyes open and all I could think about was taking a nap…so the Easter stuff just came out last week. We have several fun things that we use from DaySpring that you can read about in this post and our collection of Easter books is growing too.
If you follow me on Instagram (@jessmcclenahan) you already saw a little peek of our newest Easter project this year. Last year me made an Easter mountain out of salt dough. The boys loved that but I wanted to try something new this year. I had seen the idea to make an Easter garden on Pinterest a few times. I never really found a good link with step-by-step directions but just made up my own using this picture and caption.
We used a 10 inch clay saucer for the base and a 4 inch clay pot for the tomb. I wish I would have found a smaller pot for the tomb because it was hard to mound the dirt around the pot…but we made it work.
After we got the “mountain” built we sprinkled on grass seed and put a few little rocks from our driveway around the front.
And then our Easter mountain turned into a full-out construction zone. Gotta love little boys.
This project would have been so much easier to do outside but it was cold and windy so we were stuck inside. I thought about telling the boys we couldn’t make a mess inside but they were just having so much fun. I may start to see grass popping up through the cracks in my wood floor pretty soon…oh well, I’m pretty sure it was worth the moments of peace that the mess brought.
I bought a 4 inch clay saucer to close the tomb with but Levi insisted that we needed a rock instead. We might need to find a bigger rock though! We planted our grass seed on the 4th and it started popping up on the 9th. Today it was filling in pretty well over most of the mountain. We spray it throughout the day with a spray bottle to keep the grass watered. We still need to make our crosses which we will do this week. I’ll have to take another picture sometime so you can see it all finished.
I was looking for some ideas for my Sunday School class over the weekend and came across this video. Have your kids seen this already? I just loved how Phil Vischer talks about the meaning of Easter and why it is so important. I have been thinking a lot about what it means that Jesus stood under the stream of God’s wrath in my place…that God looked at Jesus and saw all of my sin…all of your sin. That’s a hard thing for me to wrap my own mind around let alone explain to my preschooler. I loved the visual in this video when Jesus was on the cross and how God saw his Son stained with all the sin of the world. What a horrible thing to imagine and yet such a beautiful picture of the gospel and His love for us. I showed this to my Sunday School class today and then Levi and I watched it this afternoon. And then we watched it three more times because he loved it so much. I am praying that it gives me more opportunities to share truth with my kids this week as we continue to talk about Easter.
Jesus is alive!
That’s not just good news…that’s amazing news!
And now I want to go buy the What’s in the Bible? videos. Do you have them?