How to Organise an Easter Egg Hunt in the Garden

One of the most loved holidays, Easter brings together friends and families to celebrate the idea of rebirth, good defeating evil and light breaking through the darkness, as well as end the Lent season with delicious meals.

But Easter celebrations are also very colourful, providing fun for children and adults alike. There are plenty of Easter games and activities and there’s no better way to engage everyone in the fun than a classic egg hunt with lots of witty clues, sweet treats, and surprise prizes.

Here are our ideas for a fantastic Easter egg hunt in the garden!

Start with Easter decorations

Before you organise your Easter egg hunt, make sure your garden and house are properly decorated so that everyone takes delight. There’s a myriad of colourful egg decorations, happy bunnies, beautiful baskets and flower arrangements available in stores and online but you can also try your hand at some DIY. There are plenty of places online where you can find inspiration and tutorials like Pinterest.

Divide the hunt by age

If you have children of different ages participating in the hunt, make sure everyone gets an equal chance by defining different parts of the garden for separate hunts or use eggs of different colours for each age group.

You can also designate a particular colour for each child. If there will be more children taking part in the hunt, you can mismatch plastic eggs of different colours, so that children will work in teams to find a certain amount of eggs and put them back together in matching colours.

Make it easier for the smaller children by leaving eggs where they can easily spot them, such as low branches and in open places, but engage the older ones with hard-to-find places, such as under leaves, in rain pipes, or in the mailbox.

The hunt doesn’t end until the last egg is found, so make sure you’ve counted all the eggs before you hide them and keep a count of how many eggs are found during the hunt.

Set hunt boundaries

It’s all fun and games but safety comes first. Make sure everyone knows the boundaries of the egg hunt to prevent fun-turned-pandemonium. Children will be eager to snap up the colourful eggs, hiding treats and prizes, but they have to know they can hop around only in strictly designated areas.

Follow the bunny prints

Get everyone excited to participate in the egg hunt by printing bunny footprints to lead them to the first clue and cards for the clues. You can download some cute templates at Embellish.

As for the clues themselves, you can make them fun and hard to guess so that they tinker with the older children’s minds and keep them interested. If you’re having trouble thinking of clues on your own, you can find some downloadable Easter egg hunt riddle clues online.

Alternative prizes

Kids already have enough chocolate around Easter as it is, so for your treasure hunt, you can replace sweets with some special prizes such as small toys coins, stickers, beads, or numbers that correspond to bigger prizes like stuffed animals, books, or gift certificates.

Or, even better – the prizes can be vouchers they get to use at their discretion, for example, “Film night with hot chocolate” or “Cake day with Mum.” You can also put smaller candies or items in balloons and scatter them around the garden. Children will love popping the balloons to get their prize. This also works for hiding clues.

Learning while having fun

For younger children who are just learning to spell and read, you can hide letters in Easter eggs to spell out a hidden message – something like “Some bunny loves you,” for example. This will also encourage cooperation as they might rely on each other to work their way to the Easter prize.