Crafty Easter - sheltering from the snow

Earlier in the year, I was chatting over a cuppa with a friend who has two kids.  One of them is DH's godson, so we try to see them fairly regularly.  Anyhow, we were talking about this blog and she asked if she could bring the kids over sometime to do some crafts together and we set a date for yesterday.

In the meantime, I've been roaming Pinterest for ideas that are suitable for early primary school aged kids - and found loads (along with plenty that would be a bit adventurous for that age-group).  If you are on Pinterest you can see some of my favourites. Then it was 'just' a matter of choosing which ones to concentrate on with them.

A couple of years ago I spent some time teaching at a small primary school and near Easter as part of my German lessons with the juniors, we talked about German Easter traditions, which includes dying/painting blown eggs.  I haven't done it since and it was pretty successful (if a bit smelly with boiled eggs and vinegar in a fairly small classroom!).

This is the outcome 

I thought we might give it another go.  I've found various methods for dying - natural and using food colouring (I don't think I realised how much you need to get vibrant colours when we made the ones above) and also found that it is possible to get white eggs (ie eggs with white shells) at M&S.  I chose the lightest brown ones I could find for the classroom session above, which obviously affects the shade of the finished egg.  Still looking back at the photo a couple of years on, they look pretty good, even though I say so myself

To save a bit of time, I blew some eggs ahead of time.  It is possible to get 'egg blowing kits', but the ones I found online cost more to post than the cost of the kit.  However, there is such a thing as a nasal aspirator (lovely!) for babies that can be used instead, but none of the branches of Boots I went to had them in stock.  Instead I resorted to the old-fashioned method of huffing and puffing and exhausting my poor cheeks.  The only 'downside' is that DH and I have had to use up the extruded egg in various things - pancakes, cakes, scrambled eggs, omelette .... our systems will be totally eggs-austed!!!

However, our 5 and 6 year old friends had different ideas and got stuck straight in with paint, glue, glitter and tissue paper (I think I over planned and forgot that kids need to let THEIR creativity run wild, not mine!)

In egg-cup: 5-year old's 1st attempt
In box - clockwise from top right 6-year old's 1st, Mummy's creation, 6-year old's 2nd,
5 year-old's 2nd, DH's 'creation' (with help from kids!), mine

We had great fun and made a huge mess (there is still glitter everywhere)!  But that is half the fun isn't it?  And we even got DH to join in!!!

The proud artists with the cake we decorated for tea