Egg Dyeing

We'd already learned a little about pysanky during our Russia Unit (though they are Ukrainian, strictly speaking) so it was fun to try the techniques ourselves (sort of) (not that our "techniques," i.e. drawing on the eggs with white crayon, produce really anything close to those beautiful works of art). You can buy pysanky kits and use actual melted beeswax to create the patterns, but that seemed like something to try when the kids are older. :)  Here are some traditional pysanky symbols/patterns we learned about.

Anyway, we had the most fun dyeing eggs that we've ever had. As an adult, this has been a tradition I don't get too excited about, though I love hard-boiled eggs---just plopping the eggs in egg-dye seems like way too little fun for the bother/mess factor involved. But creating patterns and interesting color combinations made it engaging enough to be worth it. We painted some designs on the eggs with clear nail polish, as well as using the white-crayon method, and those turned out really pretty also. I especially loved watching Sam come up with designs for his eggs.

We also did onion-skin eggs, using this method, which turned out SO pretty. I want to try some of these other natural dyeing techniques too, sometime. 

The finished eggs---lovely rainbows of them. Ahhhh.

Passover Dinner

During college I attended several "Seders" (I put that in quotation marks because I suppose most of them were abbreviated or otherwise altered from the true Jewish Seder) and I always found them interesting and enlightening. Some things I read online seemed to think it was offensive for Christians to celebrate Passover, but I see it as a natural outgrowth of our own Jewish roots, and a respectful way to learn more about the Savior.

There are ideas for "Christian" seders here and here, and an LDS perspective here, but after thinking about it, I decided we didn't really want a Seder dinner as such. I just wanted a special dinner where we could TALK about the Passover symbols, and how they pointed to Christ, and how they were ultimately fulfilled and transformed, and how they fit into our current Easter celebration. So, we cooked some of the traditional Passover foods, which was really fun, and had a nice Easter "feast" along with them, and spent the mealtime talking about what kinds of things Passover Season could mean for us. I thought it was really meaningful and fun, and I think we'll definitely do it again. Maybe someday it will be interesting to show the children more in depth the "scripted" parts of the Seder, but for now, I thought what we did was just right.

We ate baked ham and asparagus with hollandaise sauce, and apple/almond salad, and homemade matzos, and lemon curd cheesecake for dessert. Yum!

Easter Crafts

You hear a lot of back-and-forth about "the True Meaning" of Easter at this time of year (and likewise at Christmas), and it's obviously a subject everyone has to do some thinking about when planning celebrations for their own families. My own philosophy was influenced by one of my favorite teachers at BYU, Wilfred Griggs. He spent a class period discussing so-called "secular" symbols of Christmas; their origins and how they could actually be tied back to Jesus Christ in various ways. I came away with the impression (though I don't know if he said this specifically) that it was much more effective to find ways to link holiday symbols to Christ than to simply discard these symbols or dismiss them as "just pagan imports" or whatever.

In other words, since what a given symbol MEANS is largely of my own mental construction anyway (i.e. a symbol has little meaning for me until I learn/absorb that meaning), why not use cultural symbols, along with religious symbols, to remind our family of Christ? So that, for instance, we learn how the Christmas Tree or the Santa Claus story can be seen as, not a replacement of Christ, but as a reminder/type of Him? Not a unique approach, I realize, but it has helped inform our family's thinking about holidays.

Anyway, as we learned about Easter's history, it was interesting to see how even the "pagan" Easter traditions (the ones tied back to the fertility godess, etc.) can teach us truths about the gospel, and remind us of the resurrection, new life, and renewal that Christ brings.

We did various Easter crafts during the week---these cute little chicks were easy enough, and

also these fwuffball chickies, which we just made up (fwuffballs + beady eyes + paper beaks + pipe cleaners, obviously).

We made these Speckled Easter Egg Truffles to eat, which were quite delicious. I guess I didn't take any pictures. Actually it seems I hardly took pictures of anything we did this week! I kept forgetting.

We made this "Christ ascending" craft (easy and cute)

And these "empty tomb" posters

These curly birds are also cute (we didn't make them though)

These Egg Geodes were pretty fun to make, also. (Not really that "Easter-y," but they used eggshells, so . . . whatever.) We got our alum at the "Kitchen Kneads" store (kind of a food storage specialty place) and it was much cheaper than elsewhere. You need kind of a lot of it, so it's worth searching out a place like that. Alum is used for pickling things, I guess.

This is a video of how to do the same thing.

Easter Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

One of my favorite things---maybe my very favorite thing---about homeschooling is the time and freedom it gives us to have devotional/gospel study time together. Though our schedule for Devotionals is separate from our school schedule (i.e. we are studying different things in each), we often spend one or two devotionals during each school unit highlighting topics that apply to both areas. Anyway, with an Easter Unit, there was obviously a lot more overlap, which was interesting. We spent mornings talking about our own beliefs regarding Easter, and then went into more historical/cultural topics afterwards. So I have two unit schedules for this unit---the School one is above; the Devotional one is below.

I love Easter and have always felt like there are so many more things we could do to celebrate it, but I never get on top of things early enough to do so. I still think next year I may try to start preparations even earlier, but this year I read a really good book that helped me establish a timeline and a context for the religious side of things, so I based our devotionals for the week on that. It's called God So Loved the World by Eric Huntsman. It had some great topics to ponder and discuss with the kids, and I just enjoyed reading the whole thing myself. I recommend it.

The children really love charts, so this was our Holy Week chart---we filled it in each day to help us remember which events happened when. It was nice to have it up as a reminder on our wall all week.

Also, there is a great series of Bible Videos highlighting many of these events. The children really liked watching these.