These unique Easter egg hunt ideas can make for a festive and fun experience your kids will love!
While kids always seem to enjoy a typical springtime Easter egg hunt, these awesome ideas for Easter egg hunts are extra special!
Because I know your life is busy, each one of the these egg hunt ideas is easy to put together and carry out! No special crafting skills required.
And they’ll work well whether you’re planning for a small family egg hunt or for a larger group event.
Free printable Easter games for kids
To make your Easter egg hunt extra fun, download and print these cute printable Easter games from the Jen Bradley|MOMs Free Printable Library! You can use them while your kids are waiting to start egg hunting, take up some time as guests arrive, or while you reset egg hunts for different age groups.
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Unique ideas for Easter egg hunts
The different egg hunt ideas are divided into 3 different groups:
- 4 cool ideas for organizing your Easter egg hunts
- 5 non-candy ideas for Easter egg hunts
- Easter egg hunts with an educational twist
Organized egg hunt for all ages
There is nothing worse at an egg hunt than seeing a young child feeling sad that he or she didn’t get to collect many eggs. Sure, it can be character building for older kids to give some of their huge collection to a younger child, but wouldn’t it be better to organize the egg hunt to avoid this in the first place?
A simple way to organize an egg hunt for a wide variety of ages is to assign a specific color of Easter egg for a specific age.
For example, pink eggs could be found by 3 year olds, yellow eggs collected by 4 year olds, blue eggs for 5 year olds, etc. Of course, you can adjust the colors and age ranges to suit the kids who’ll be participating in your egg hunt.
As you hide the eggs before the egg hunt, you’ll want to be sure to know the color and age code so you can hide eggs appropriately for each age group. This will slow down the older kids and make them actually search instead of picking up all the eggs just laying on the ground for the little kids.
Finally, a great way to remind kids what color egg they can collect is to give them (or let them use) an inexpensive Easter basket or bucket in their egg color.
Easter egg scavenger hunt
Another great way to add variety to your Easter egg hunt is to create an Easter egg scavenger hunt checklist, especially if you have kids who are in the upper elementary school grades.
For example, kids have to find 3 blue eggs in a row, or find an egg hidden a tree.
You can always make your own, or you can snag the simple download from the Jen Bradley|MOMS free Printable Library!
Rainbow Easter egg hunt
To hold a rainbow Easter egg hunt, you’ll need lots of plastic Easter eggs in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.
Each kid will hunt for eggs in rainbow order!
To keep this organized, hand out a simple ribbon in one of the six colors randomly to each kid. This will be their starting color for the egg hunt.
It is also a great idea to have a few simple printouts posted around the house or yard so everyone can easily remember what rainbow order is!
Surprise Easter Bunny egg hunt
If you really want to surprise your kids, ask a friend, neighbor, or family member who lives nearby to hide Easter eggs outside of your house while you and the kids aren’t home. (You may even hire a teenager to hide them for you for a small fee!)
Then when you arrive at home, your kids will be amazed and excited to see that the Easter Bunny must have dropped by for an extra visit while you were gone!
Non-candy ideas for Easter egg hunts
If you’re tired of being inundated with sugar every holiday, these non-candy Easter egg hunt ideas are definitely worth looking into!
Coin-filled Easter eggs
When we needed to change our diet years ago to avoid artificial colors, we decided to fill our Easter eggs with coins instead of with candy.
To do this, simply fill eggs with a random amount of small change. You can even fill a few eggs with a dollar bill or two to up the value!
At the end of the egg hunt, kids can cash in the change special prizes or simply keep their earnings!
Special privileges Easter egg hunt
I love this idea from Play Party Plan! Make a list of special privileges that you know your kids would love. Then write them on small strips of paper and put them inside of the eggs you’ll be hiding.
Here’s a quick list of special privilege ideas:
- a free pass from chores for a day
- stay up 20 minutes past bedtime
- get a second helping of dessert
- choose the dinner menu for 3 days
- get an extra story before bed
- play a game with mom and dad
- make a treat of their choice
- extra 15 minutes of screen time
LEGO Easter egg hunt
If you have Lego lovers in your house, they’ll absolutely love this fun twist on the annual Easter egg hunt! Instead of filling eggs with candy, fill them with lots of little LEGO pieces needed to make mini-figures, vehicles, or any other creation of their choice.
For mini-figure creation, you’ll need to fill eggs with lots of hats or hair, heads bodies, and leg pieces. For vehicles, focus on adding lots of tires and wheels, steering wheels, etc.
Idea source: Frugal Fun for Boys
Glow in the dark Easter egg hunt
This is such a fun and unique egg hunt idea – especially if you have older kids or young teenagers.
Simply crack these perfect 2-inch glow sticks just before the egg hunt and stick them inside plastic Easter eggs.
Hide them at dusk and begin the hunt as soon as it is dark outside!
Idea source: Lil Luna
Meaningful faith-based egg hunt
While it is so easy to incorporate the secular and commercial side of Easter into our celebrations, it can be more difficult to focus on the religious aspect of it.
Every year, we hold our secular Easter egg hunt on Saturday and have a meaningful egg hunt on Easter Sunday.
For the meaningful egg hunt, collect pictures or art of Jesus and print them out. Fold them up and put them inside Easter eggs to hide around the house or backyard.
After all the eggs are found, have a short discussion with your kids about each picture and talk about Jesus and the miracle of the Resurrection.
Egg hunt ideas with an educational twist
These ideas are so fun, your kids may not even realized they’re educational too!
Name egg hunt
If you have several kids who are in the preschool or kindergarten stages, a name-based egg hunt would be ideal!
Simply write or use stickers to put one letter of each child’s name onto plastic eggs until you have one egg for each letter of their name. These alphabet stickers come in 7 shiny colors and could spell lots of kids’ names!
Then when kids hunt for eggs, they need to find all the letters of their name before they start collecting any eggs without letters!
Idea source: Adventures and Play
ABC or 123 egg hunt
The alphabet or number egg hunt is very similar to the name egg hunt. Instead of putting the letters of kids’ names on the outside of the eggs, put small foam letters and numbers inside the plastic Easter eggs.
If you are doing the alphabet hunt like this one from About a Mom, you’ll need as many sets of the alphabet as you have kids at the party. This classroom set of magnetic numbers would be perfect!
If you’re doing the number egg hunt, you’ll need numbers 1-12 in as many sets as you have Easter egg hunters.
Because these are a bit lengthier, it’s a good idea to have a checklist of the alphabet or numbers so kids can mark off what they’ve already found instead of trying to keep track or go in order.
Easter words egg hunt
The Easter words egg hunt is perfect for your emerging readers! To do this, write out several Easter words such as “egg,” “spring,” “Jesus,” or “flower” in large, clear printing on one piece of paper or 3×5 card for each word.
Then cut the paper or card in between each letter, so you end up with as many pieces as there are letters in the word.
Then place the letters for one word into a plastic Easter egg. Place the all letters for another word in a separate egg.
When your kids find all the eggs, they’ll have to be careful not to mix up the letters from one egg to another. It’s a good idea to color-code your words to keep them from getting mixed up. (For example, all of the pink letters spell “egg,” all the yellow letters spell “spring.”)
Once they have the letters out of the eggs, they need to unscramble the letters to create the words on the page where you originally printed them out.
(Or you could have them find one egg and create the word in that egg before finding another egg – but I don’t think my kids would wait that long!)
If your kids enjoy this, you could also work on sight words, spelling words, or vocabulary words too.
Idea source: Hands on as We Grow
Puzzle piece egg hunt
For a puzzle egg hunt, choose a simple puzzle that is 100 pieces or less. If your kids are interested in space, dinosaurs, art, maps, etc choose an educational puzzle to make this even more fun for them!
Then hide a few puzzle pieces in each of the plastic Easter eggs.
At the end of the egg hunt, have kids combine all of their puzzle pieces and put the puzzle together!
Final thoughts on unique ideas for Easter egg hunts
I hope you’re feeling inspired by these unique ideas for Easter egg hunts! There are so many to choose from that you may end up having to carry out several of them!
Your kids are sure to enjoy and appreciate a little novelty and fun added to this time-honored Easter tradition!
Don’t forget to snag your free Printable Easter printable games from the Printable Library too!
Related articles about Easter celebrations for kids:
–15 Awesome Minute to Win It Easter Games Your Family Will Love
Which of these ideas for Easter egg hunts are you excited to try this year?
