Easter is a time of celebration and is often marked by giving and receiving gifts, including Easter Eggs and other chocolate treats.
It can be an exciting time for children, as many Easter eggs are marketed using familiar characters and include treats inside the eggs.
We want children to enjoy these treats, but it’s important for us to consider how we encourage variety.
Easter treats don’t always have to be chocolate or sweet based, take a look at some of our top tips and Easter recipe ideas below!
Here are some of our ideas for planning mealtimes at Easter:
- Try to stick to a mealtime routine of 3 main meals and 2 – 3 nutritious snacks each day.
- It might help to offer chocolate after one of your child meals, as they’ll likely have less appetite, which can reduce the amount they eat. Grazing on chocolate throughout the day can make it difficult to keep track of how much your little one is having.
- Think about portion sizes. For example, a toddlers portion is roughly 2 – 4 squares of chocolate or 6-8 small chocolate buttons. Less than you might think!
- If children receive a number of Easter eggs, encourage them to put some away in the cupboard for another time.
- Keep Easter eggs out of sight, because if your little one can see them they’re more likely to ask for them.
- When offering your child chocolate, it might help to break off the amount that you’re happy for them to eat, rather than leaving it out for them to help themselves.
Easter Recipe Ideas
We tried out different Easter themed recipes with nursery children and they went down a treat! They loved getting involved, learning about food and being creative!
Babybel Bunny Faces: Babybel cheese with carrot and celery fingers. Let the kids be creative with the decoration
Eggy Easter Chicks: Hard boiled eggs, use carrots and blueberries to decorate
Fruity Eggs: Egg shaped pitta with natural yoghurt and any variety or fruit (we used berries). You could cut up other fruits into soft manageable finger food sized pieces and let children decorate their pittas (you could also use pancakes!).
Frozen Easter Pudding: We mixed natural yoghurt and a range of different fruits, including banana and mixed berries, placed them in cupcake cases and popped them in the freezer for a few hours. A delicious and nutritious alternative to ice cream.
Hot Cross Muffins: This hot cross muffins are a fun take on traditional buns! They’re easy to create, making them the perfect Easter cooking activity with little ones! They’ll enjoy practising basic cooking skills, such as measuring, mixing and chopping. Click here for our recipe card! (PDF, 280KB)
Hot Cross Buns: This recipe requires and little more time to make but is a great way to practice your baking skills. Click here to watch our YouTube video (opens in new tab)
Bouncing Bunny Pancakes: Create this adorable bunny out of delicious pancakes! Click here for our recipe card! (PDF, 513KB)
Banana & peanut butter Easter cupcakes with a cream cheese topping: These super simple banana cupcakes are a fantastic baking activity to get little ones involved with! They’ll love helping to weigh, stir and pipe the ingredients. This recipe is lower in sugar than normal cupcakes and uses cream cheese and nut butter for the toppings. Click here for the free recipe card. (PDF, 496KB)
Fruity Easter shapes: If you’re short on time, these fruity Easter shapes are for you! Simply use different Easter themed cookie cutters to stamp out shapes from your chosen fruit, e.g. pineapple, watermelon, mango, apple, pear, etc.
Hummus with Easter shaped pitta pockets: This hummus recipe is the perfect snack! It’s a good source of protein, iron and fibre. It can be served with pitta or used as a dip for your favourite vegetables. Your little ones will love helping to recreate this recipe! Click here for your free activity card. (PDF, 148KB)
Bunny Bread: Our Bunny Bread is the perfect Easter snack and it’s so quick and easy to make. We enjoyed ours with a yoghurt dip! Click here for your free recipe card (PDF, 185KB)
Other Easter Activities
Plan an Egg Hunt in your garden-swap some of the chocolate eggs for painted hard boiled eggs, rabbit stickers or toys.
Go for walks or scoot/ cycle to the park– you can play i-spy along the way.
Try out a Change for Life 10 minute shake up (opens in new tab) – such as Judy’s Hop-a-thon.
Craft activities– such as drawing Easter eggs, painting hard-boiled eggs and making paper Easter hats.
