Easter

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter. This is a special holiday for me and though I try to keep it about the true meaning of Easter, I do allow my daughter to have a basket, color eggs and hunt for them. We simply do not tell her that a bunny had anything to do with it. We explain, like the Veggie Tales do, that while those things are fun they are not why we celebrate Easter. In light of that fact our favorite Easter video is Veggie Tales - An Easter Carol. In fact in Sunday School we also read the story An Easter Carol from the Veggie Tales Bible Storybook. Those are nice because they are followed by the actual Bible story from the NIrV and it went went right along with our sermon.


At home we also read the story from our Read with Me Bible which also uses the NIrV and she would read some of them herself from The Beginner's Bible. I am amazed at how well she can read those!

We did a few crafts. On Palm Sunday we made palm branches using the Palm Fan Craft from Sundayschoolkids.com with our Sunday School class. Gess really liked them and they held up rather well. She spent the week waving them saying "Hosanna!" This week we simply colored a picture of a cross with some lilies. We also made a Jelly Bean Prayer Craft from baptist-church.suite101.com. They really enjoyed making those and were certainly eager to eat them. Here is Gess holding hers.


This is how we emphasized the true meaning of Easter. There was a lot of explaining about Jesus' death on the cross but how that was not the end of the story. Gess can tell you that we celebrate Easter because "Jesus is Alive!"

For secular activities we did the typical coloring of eggs on Saturday and when she came home from church she found an "Easter surprise" which was her basket of goodies. Then she hunted for some eggs.



We also took the leftover plastic eggs and made a craft I found at one of the other blogs I follow regularly. The Adventures of Homeschooling Noah is another blog about homeschooling her boy who also has Down Syndrome. They have really been an inspiration to me and a lot of fun to get to know. Anyway, she shared an Easter Egg Snake Craft that they made and I thought it looked like fun so we tried it. While Noah's was much prettier because they had really cool glittery eggs, Gess' still turned out really well. This activity is great because we got to work on both patterns and motor skills while making it. Here is our version, but be sure to check out Noah's snake too!




Finally I will share Gess coloring her eggs. This is the first year she could really do it on her own after we showed her how. We first drew on them with a white clear crayon. You could not see what you drew until you colored the egg and it came through. As you will hear in this video the egg she colored had a cross on it. That was an easy thing for her to draw and yet it kept in mind what the celebration was really all about. All in all, we had a really nice Holiday. You can read my thoughts on the true meaning of Easter on my personal blog at Lori's Say On The Matter.