Tips for Organizing a Neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt
Hosting a neighborhood Easter egg hunt is a fun treat for the kids and a great way to meet your neighbors. These useful tips will make the organization a breeze.
Invitations
Invitation cards can be bought at any store, but if you want to save some money, try making your own. Colorful paper cut into Easter-related shapes like bunnies, eggs or ducks can easily be made into invitations. To save time, simply find a clipart of your chosen shape on your computer and paste them into a Word or Powerpoint document. Next, add a text box for the details of your Easter egg hunt, including, the date, time and venue, remembering to leave a space for the person’s name. Also, remember to include your phone number or email address for easy communication. Duplicating these shapes across the page will give you an outline to follow when cutting out the invite, and will also save you from writing the invitations out by hand.
Venue
The location of your hunt will depend on how many you invite. Small groups can easily be accommodated in someone’s house or backyard, but larger groups will need an outdoor space like the neighborhood park. If having your hunt outdoors, be sure to check the weather forecast and have a backup in case there’s rain on the horizon. You could either have a separate location or make the alternative “rain date” clear on the invitation.
Preparing the eggs
There are several options for Easter eggs. Regular, hollowed-out and painted eggs are cheap, but painstaking to make. Chocolate eggs are fun but you may run into problems with mothers who don’t approve of their children eating too much candy. Perhaps the safest bet is plastic eggs filled with little trinkets. The best thing is, these eggs can easily be recycled. Simply get the kids to give you their plastic Easter eggs at the end of the hunt in exchange for a goody bag. That way, you will get to keep the eggs so you can throw another party next year. Alternatively, you can pass them on to another neighbor to share the organizing responsibilities.
Hiding the eggs
When hiding the eggs, keep the age group of your participants in mind. Cater for younger children by leaving eggs on lower branches or in the open. If you have several different age groups, it may be better to clearly divide the playing area with tape. Alternatively, you can choose different colored eggs for different age groups, making the rules clear at the start of the hunt.
Holding the hunt
If the children are very young, you may want to ask other adults to stand in designated areas to supervise. Otherwise, just make the rules, if any, clear, blow a whistle, and the hunt is on.
Refreshments
Guests will get hungry after the hunt so make sure you have snacks and drinks lined up. An easy way to do this is to include a request for refreshments in your invitation. You can also use a Google document that can be accessed by all the families involved to coordinate the refreshments so you don’t end up with too much of any one item.
An Easter egg hunt is a wonderful way to welcome the Spring. The children will get a nice day out and neighbors will have a chance to interact and make new friends. Organizing one is easy, but perhaps the best tip is to share the burden by inviting other families in the neighborhood to help you co-host a party.
