We like to give a little something to all of the children at Ethan's nursery for every holiday.  I think that it's nice for him as it encourages giving and starts conversations about all of his nursery friends so that I can learn a little bit more about what's going on at school.  However, Ethan goes to a very big nursery, so we need really simple ideas that we can reproduce for a lot of children and that Ethan can be involved with as much as possible (we did simple candy canes on cards for Christmas and these for Valentine's Day).



So our idea for Easter was to use the little plastic eggs, put a few treats inside and finish them off with some Easter washi tape.  Super quick and easy, but great for Ethan's development and nice for the kiddies to get a little treat.


Finally, we finished off each egg with some lovely Easter washi tape, carefully placing it along the seam of the egg (fine motor development again) and just making them look extra special!  This will also keep them sealed when Ethan hands them out at the end of the day, so that the children have to wait for their parents to let them open their eggs!

We love Easter and have been preparing in lots of different ways, have a look at our Pinterest board to see what else we've been up to:

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Follow Play & Learn Everyday's board Easter on Pinterest.

I love to fill up an Easter basket with fun little presents for the kids to open on Easter, and not just chocolate!  For his previous 3 Easters Ethan hasn't really eaten chocolate, but now that he is old enough (he's almost 3 1/2) to have some I think that it's really important to emphasize healthy eating and to show him that there are plenty of other fun things to receive at Easter!



There are a few different categories that I like to cover in Easter basket gifts, so in Ethan's basket he has:

Someone to cuddle

Ethan is going to absolutely love this cuddly Benjamin Bunny from the Peter Rabbit stories from Vivid Toys.  A few weeks ago he dressed up as Peter Rabbit for World Book Day, and since then he's had a real connection to the books and the show, so he'll be very excited to have his very own Benjamin Bunny to take on adventures with him!

A book to read

We have quite the collection of Easter books already, so I just went with a bunny theme this year and chose him a book called The Bunny of Bluebell Hill.  

Something with his name on it

Who doesn't love to have something personalised especially for them? Ethan can recognise his name now, so he's going to love his special Easter mug from Born Gifted that is just for him.  It says 'Happy Easter Ethan' on the front and I was able to put a message on the back as well ('Love Mommy and Daddy xxxx')  And if the weather continues to be as cold and rainy as it has been, it will be perfect for a nice hot chocolate on Easter morning!

A game to play

I think it's a really good idea to give Ethan something to keep him busy on Easter after the excitement of the Easter egg hunt is over.  So a game is the perfect choice, and we love Hoppy Floppy's Happy Hunt, we reviewed it earlier in the week and Ethan keeps asking to play it again!

An egg with a toy in it

You've got to have some sort of egg with a surprise inside for Easter (that isn't chocolate!) and we found such a cute one from WOW Toys, with a dinosaur inside!  My Dinky Dino Egg is a cute egg that's easy for little hands to open up and find the dinosaur inside, the dinosaur can be removed and placed back in the egg, which makes a sort of chirping sound when you push down on him.  Ethan is going to love it!

Healthy treats


And just to ensure that Ethan does get some nice treats but doesn't eat too much chocolate, I'm including these Apple and Date bars from Organix, he loves them and they are a sweet treat but won't have him bouncing off the walls all day!

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We've been making lots of different Easter decorations, but these have to be my absolute favourites so far!  I love salt dough and have seen some great ideas for painting salt dough Easter eggs, but as my kids are too young to really paint details we went for a different approach and used our hands to imprint the dough and then paint in a solid colour.



First we made the salt dough using a very basic recipe of 2 parts flour, 2 parts salt and 1 part water.  Ethan poured all of the ingredients into the bowl and stirred it around.  We worked together to knead the dough into a ball, then we rolled it out nice and flat.  We have some great little Easter cookie cutters that we used to cut out most of the shapes (except for the large eggs which I just shaped by hand.)


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Ivy is at an age when she just likes to get into everything to explore and examine it in every way possible!  So a basket full of eggs to open up with surprises inside is a perfect activity for her!


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We got a fun new game from Learning Resources called Hoppy Floppy's Happy Hunt Game, just in time for Easter!  It's the perfect gift to give your little one in their Easter basket, and will keep them busy for ages.  Ethan and I sat and played it over and over again today, he loved it!


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It's spring and we're ready to start growing some plants!  We are planning to move to a new house quite soon so we aren't going to do any planting in the garden, but I just can't help but grow a few pots of seeds in the house. 

Happy spring!  We may not have the warmest of weather yet, but there are signs of spring everywhere we go, so it's time to bring some of that brightness inside!  On our walks home Ethan has been picking little daisies from the grass and wanting somewhere to put them when we get home, so I decided that we should make some little vases for them.

Today we are starting to get ready for Easter!  So step one had to be getting our Easter baskets ready. 



We used some simple sand buckets instead of baskets, because they seemed much easier to decorate and safer for Ivy (she would definitely try to chew on a basket!)  Then I dug out as many stickers as I could find!  



Ethan did really well at finding the letters to spell out his name first (even though the stickers we had were all capitals, so I was impressed!)  Then he just went crazy with the stickers!  He was very excited to have so many stickers in front of him and no rules about where they could go.  He wanted a variety of the foam stickers, shiny stickers and character stickers to go all around his basket.  I didn't have to help him at all, he just happily did the whole thing himself.



Of course it was a little bit different for Ivy as she's only 13 months old!  I spelled out her name for her, then started handing her one sticker at a time to stick on.  Let's just say that there was a lot of crumpling up of stickers before I managed to get her to stick any on!  But eventually she did do a few, then I just had to convince her not to pick them back off again!






















They both did a fantastic job of decorating their Easter baskets, so now the countdown to Easter begins!  I'm prepared to wake up tomorrow to Ethan asking questions about when the Easter Bunny will be here! 

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Sometimes Ethan gets bored of drawing with regular crayons and coloured pencils, but as soon as I bring out a new drawing implement he is right there and excited to try it out!  So today I dug out the finger crayons that he hasn't used for ages, and set out the colours of the rainbow for him to draw with.  I love finger crayons because they're easy to use for children of quite a young age, and there's no focus on pencil grip or anything else, just the joy of mark making.


Ethan couldn't wait to start drawing!  He was happily scribbling away his rainbow within seconds, going through each colour one at a time drawing the colourful arches.  He even wrote his name at the top in rainbow colours!


And as it's St Patrick's Day we even had a chat about leprechauns and a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which we drew in together at the end!

This week we got a new book from Parragon to review, it's called Red Fish, Yellow Fish and it's perfect for Ivy.  At just over a year old, she's still not that into books.  Well, she enjoys pulling them all off the shelves, and she likes lift the flaps and touch and feel books, but she's just not into stories yet.  So this was nice, because it's a big chunky board book without too many words, but Ivy will get a little something different from it.


It's quite simple and goes through different seaside animals and other things of two different colours.  I was able to read it to Ivy a few times, and even got her to point to things to identify along with me.  Hopefully this is the start of her learning to love books!

What have you been reading this week?


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It is almost Red Nose Day and we have been busy preparing!  We love raising money for charity, it teaches the children a lot about giving back and we get to be a part of something with the whole country.  The first step, of course, was to be dressed for the occasion, so we bought these cute tshirts from TK Maxx a few weeks ago:


Then we had to do some baking!  My idea was to make red velvet noses using a cake pop mould, then coating them with red candy melts...these would have been amazing! However, we haven't been well this week so we had to do a little something with what we had in the house.  This meant making vanilla sponge cake and using red food colouring to brighten it up! Ethan was determined to add the food colouring himself, and of course poured in about half the bottle!  They are a bit of a strange consistency and have a funny flavour, so these 'noses' won't be going to nursery for the bake sale (I'll donate through the nursery and buy loads of other sweets though, not to worry!)



Now I didn't take part myself with Team Honk this year, but a lovely group of bloggers went to the big Comic Relief Danceathon and boogied their socks off for six whole hours!  You can still donate to support them and the whole cause.  And don't forget to watch the big show on Friday night!