Springtime brings a lot of holidays and other fun events, including Mother’s day, Spring break, and Easter. The weather starts to get nicer and warmer, the days get a little longer, and everyone is constantly looking for excuses to get outside and do something fun together after a winter of being cooped up.
For many, Easter is a holiday filled with church services, visits from the Easter bunny, and some kind of good brunch spread. But, let’s be honest, many kids are looking forward to the annual Easter egg hunt. Finding hidden eggs is like a treasure hunt and it is one of the cute Easter traditions many families participate in. If you are looking for new ideas for your family’s Easter egg hunt this year, we’ve got you covered. From relay races to options for older kids and adults only, this list covers every situation.
If you’ve ever hosted or put together an Easter egg hunt, you probably know that they are often just a mad dash while everyone scrambles to find the most eggs. (Pun intended!) It can be a lot of work for just a few minutes of fun. This list will help you come up with some ideas that can make the fun last a little longer and make sure everyone has an eggcellent time!
Enjoy a Hunt Anytime!
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What is the Origin of the Easter Egg Hunt?
Eggs are a symbol of resurrection and during the medieval period, eggs were forbidden during Lent. Once Easter Sunday came, eggs were a huge part of the feast. Easter egg hunts are believed to date back to the 16th century in Germany when Martin Luther organized egg hunts for his congregation to celebrate this special time and engage men, women, and children in a fun way.
Easter Egg Hunt Checklist
Putting together your own Easter egg hunt is easy. For a classic, simple hunt, you just need the following:
- Easter baskets to help collect the eggs
- Plastic eggs to hide (or real ones if you’re brave)
- Trinkets and goodies as fillers for the eggs
- Other specifics if you are using one of the Easter egg hunt ideas listed below
Have some fun with the planning process and consider changing up your strategy each year to really give your kids something to look forward to.
12 Easter Egg Hunt Ideas
These creative ideas will help you enjoy the celebrations at home or any location. Just make sure to do a little prep work the week before and enjoy one of the best Easter celebrations yet.
1. Compete as Teams in an Easter Egg Relay Race
Incorporate a little teamwork into your Easter egg hunt this year by putting together teams and searching for eggs in a relay race format. Only one team member is allowed to hunt at a time and once they find an egg, they bring it back to the starting line and tag the next team member in.
If your Easter gathering has a mixture of older kids and younger kids, this will help level the playing field because you can pick teams that are equally matched with ages. Plus, it’s a great way to encourage the kids to work together and help the little kids find more eggs instead of grabbing them all so quickly.
2. Fill Only One Egg With Something Extra Special
If you’ve seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you’re probably familiar with the famous golden tickets that the characters found in order to visit the chocolate factory. You can incorporate a similar idea into your Easter egg hunt by putting one or a few special items in certain eggs that are a step up from the rest.
You can include a golden egg that has the big prize—and make it the most difficult to find! If you have more than one child, you could hide enough so everyone can find one and set a limit so one person doesn’t end up with all of the golden eggs. You can find eggs of different colors, including gold, at most large retailers.
3. Assign a Specific Color Egg to Each Person
If you’ve got a competitive family but you want everyone to come away with the same number of eggs, consider assigning a specific color to each family member. This will help even the playing field and make sure everyone can walk away with lots of goodies. Give each participant a basket with their coordinating color and send them out to search. This also allows you to hide eggs based on height and searching abilities.
4. Use Glow in the Dark Eggs for an Evening Easter Egg Hunt
Easter egg hunt ideas don’t all have to take place on a sunny day. Change things up by hosting a nighttime Easter egg hunt with glow-in-the-dark eggs and glow sticks. There’s just something about running around in the dark that makes things a little more intense, plus you can make the hunt a bit harder in the dark.
5. Make the Egg Hunt into a Scavenger Hunt
Instead of just hiding the eggs, why not create an Easter egg scavenger hunt complete with clues and puzzles to solve? There are many ways to do this. For example, invisible ink is fun to incorporate. It can be revealed in so many ways that it’s almost like a science experiment.
You can also turn the event into more of a scavenger hunt where there is an order to find the eggs and each one has a clue leading to the next. The kids can work together to solve each puzzle or you can create a unique adventure for each child. If you struggle with the creativity to come up with riddles or clues, you can take advantage of the wide variety of online printables to help with that.
This scavenger hunt can include more than just Easter eggs as well. You can have everyone searching for bunny tracks, specific flowers or plants in the yard, or even critters that are common in your garden. Embrace everything that nature offers and include it in your springtime celebration.
If this sounds like a great idea, but you’re short on time, contact us! We create custom scavenger hunts for all sorts of special occasions. We can help you put together a festive event everyone will remember for years to come!
6. Skip the Candy and Include Coupons Instead to be Cashed in Later
Candy is usually the most popular choice, but it’s not the only option. You could include some “coupons” (also known as privilege cards) that the kids can cash in later. These can be written on small slips of paper and put inside each egg. A few examples would be: stay up an hour later, have dessert before dinner, take an after-school trip to movies, skip the vegetables with dinner, or the ability to skip certain chores.
You can include a variety of both little and big things, but this idea will save you the piles of candy wrappers and sugar crashes and provide an excuse to have more family time. Get some free printable options on the Over the Big Moon site.
7. Reverse the Hunt and Have the Kids Hide
A fun twist is to reverse the egg hunt or include a separate one for adults. Let the kids hide the eggs and have the adults search for them. You can use the previous idea with a twist. Have the kids write out “coupon” ideas that they want to cash in, and for each egg that the parents don’t find in a predetermined amount of time, the kids get to cash in those coupons. This could be a fun way to shake things up a bit and let the kids feel like they have some control.
If you choose this route, it’s probably good to set some ground rules. Kids can get extremely creative and it’s probably important to make sure that they aren’t writing down ideas that cost thousands of dollars or would have them out of school for a week. You want to be able to honor the items that you don’t find or it will lose some of the fun.
8. Puzzle Piece Egg Hunt
Do you have puzzle lovers in your family? Combine an Easter egg hunt with a puzzle by hiding each individual piece in an egg, and asking everyone to work together to find all the pieces and put the puzzle together. By combining these two activities, you can turn a 15-minute dash around the yard into an activity that keeps everyone busy for an hour (or more). With so many puzzles available, you can get everything from a 20 piece puzzle up to 1000 pieces. You decide how intense you want this event to be.
9. Choose an Order to Find the Eggs In
Many Easter egg hunt ideas begin with a race through the yard or house with everyone just grabbing every bit of color they see. You can slow down the process a bit and make the fun last a little longer by creating a certain order that the eggs must be found.
Create a pattern of colors or designs. For example, you could make the rule that each egg hunter must find eggs in the order of the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. This helps make it a memory game because they may find certain colors before others and need to remember where they were.
Another great option is to put letters on each egg and challenge them to find the eggs that can spell their names. This is a great way to cater to distinct age groups because you can make it more challenging with the names of older kids and easier for the younger ones.
Layout the challenge and then set them loose to start searching. Have them bring back one egg at a time in the correct order before they can grab the next egg. This could turn a 10-minute easter egg hunt into an hour-long game.
10. Swap Candy with Coins for the Piggy Bank
Do you have kids that have been stashing money away in their piggy banks for something special? If you want to give them a little help, or maybe just avoid the sugar rush that comes with Easter candy, you can swap the candy for coins. Use a different amount in each egg, so that they never know what they might find. You can even include a couple of dollar bills to make things extra exciting.
It won’t cost any more than purchasing a few large bags of candy, but it will be perfect for those budget-savvy kids or the ones who just don’t like sweet treats as much.
11. Host a Virtual Easter Egg Hunt
If you can’t get together with everyone for Easter this year, make your annual event a virtual one! There are multiple ways this can be done. Invite participants to meet at a designated time on a video chat platform, and set up a hunt according to your preferences.
You can involve a parent or guardian at each location and have each one hide the same number of eggs in the room where they’ll be video chatting. Ask kids to yell out a funny phrase or do a silly dance when they find eggs. When all of the little treasures are located, the children will have a blast showing off their treats and talking about where and how they found them.
Alternatively, you could opt to hide eggs in spots that can be seen around you while you’re on camera. In each egg, hide a description of a prize that can be delivered via the Internet—like gift cards that can be sent electronically—or mailed to the recipients. Hide enough for each participant to spot at least one, and set a max number of finds so everyone gets something. When attendees have hit their max, they could offer hints to those still hunting. When all is said and done, everyone will have a ball, and walk away with a special surprise!
You might also consider an online hunt. Create or designate a website where participants can search for hidden egg images. Assign each color or design a specific number of points. When all of the eggs have been spotted, add up the points, declare a winner (or three), and reveal the prizes.
12. Put Together an Adult’s-Only Easter Egg Hunt
Fill the eggs with fun adult items like tiny liquor bottles, $5 coffee gift cards, or even scratch-off lottery tickets. Include the usual items like candy as well, but you can get them more invested if they know that there are special prizes sprinkled throughout.
Another option is to have trophies and prizes. Send the adults out searching and hunting for eggs and then at the end, you can award prizes for the most found. This is a great option if you want to include a larger prize or a few larger prizes instead of a bunch of smaller things hidden in the eggs themselves.
Other Fun Easter Activities and Easter Games
Whether you’re hosting a party or just entertaining your own family, there are some other great games and activities you can put together for the Easter holiday. Here are a few ideas that stick with the theme and everyone will love them.
Decorate Easter Eggs
Dying eggs is a classic Easter activity that the whole family can enjoy. Of course, you can find hundreds of variations on egg decorating on the Internet. Stick to the simple dye kits from the store or try one of the fun new DIY projects. Studio DIY has information on how to make emoji Easter eggs or fun Lisa Frank Easter eggs.
Make sure to use hard-boiled eggs and then serve them as part of your Easter brunch or as snacks for the week ahead. A little color in your lunchbox can improve your overall mood.
Utilize Peeps in Fun Ways
Peeps are one of the top-selling candies during the Easter season. These marshmallow classics can be transformed into art pieces. Organizations around the country host competitions for Peep Art. See some of the wild examples of this in this Mental Floss article. These tasty treats come in multiple colors so you can really exercise your creative muscles with the family.
You can also play silly games like the peep version of Chubby Bunny. This game involves counting how many marshmallows you can fit in your mouth while continuing to say “chubby bunny.” Just swap classic marshmallows for colorful peeps and you’ll have the entire party giggling and wanting to try the game.
Guess the Number of Jelly Beans
Jelly beans are commonly associated with this springtime holiday, so they are fun to incorporate into your celebrations. One of the easiest games to set up and play is a guessing game for how many jelly beans are in the container. You can use a cookie jar, a large can, or really anything you have laying around at home. Make sure you know the count and then invite your brunch guests to submit their guesses on the count. Whoever is the closest without going over wins a prize.
Not only is this a fun and easy game to engage your guests, but it can also be a great decoration. Jelly beans are colorful and this can be your centerpiece. Just beware of the Every Flavor beans which include flavors like ear wax and dirt and might not be fun to snack on.
Pin the Tail on the Easter Bunny
Whether it’s the tail or the ears or a carrot for the bunny to snack on, you can utilize the classic party game, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, but make it a bunny instead for the holiday. This is a great way to get kids up and moving around and all you need is a large bunny printed out. Any store with decorations will have something that you can use.
Give each player their own tail or carrot before blindfolding them and then let them try and get as close as possible to the correct location on the bunny. This game will have guests of all ages laughing and excited to play.
Make Your Own Confetti Eggs
Cascarones (often called egg poppers) are hollowed-out eggs filled with confetti. They originated in Spain and are common in Mexico. The idea comes from old tales that fathers would crack an egg over the head of a child who had misbehaved. Now, these eggs can be broken on someone’s head and the result is way more fun than yolk dripping down. Cascarones are popular for all sorts of holidays, but the egg correlation makes them a great Easter party favor.
These eggs can be made by using a pin or a knife to create a small hole at the end of the eggshell to allow the insides to be emptied out. The shell should be cleaned and dried and then you can fill it with confetti and close the hole with glue or tissue paper. Get a full tutorial on the “Oh Happy Day” website.
When eggs are filled, you can have fun smashing them. One fun way to incorporate them is to fill one egg with glitter instead of confetti and then have a prize for the person who ends up with the glitter egg. Each person can take turns smashing their eggs open to see who the big winner is.
Complete Some Fun Easter Crafts
Dyeing Easter eggs isn’t the only fun craft for an Easter gathering. You can include the whole family and make an Easter village that will work as beautiful decorations for years to come. Anything with a Spring theme is appropriate for Easter as well, so brighten up your refrigerator with cut-out flowers, drawings of gardens and birds, and have fun with crafts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Think outside the box with some creative Easter egg hunt ideas! Use glow-in-the-dark Easter eggs, incorporate special golden eggs, or put clues in eggs and make your event a scavenger hunt!
With older kids, use Easter egg hunt ideas that make finding treats more challenging. Designate an order in which they need to find the eggs, or fill eggs with clues to make it more of a scavenger hunt.
Like scavenger hunts, Easter egg hunts involve friendly competition and finding things. Either can be done in a myriad of ways, and could involve riddles, clues, and prizes.