Planning Your Easter Egg Hunt

Easter egg hunts are a fun activity for both kids and adults. They can be as small or large as you wish, and can take place either indoors or outdoors, or both! In this article we’ll look at some of the ways you can make the activity as fun as possible. We’ll first take a look at some of the ways of making a child’s Easter Egg hunt work, before we move on to the larger-scale hunts which adults might participate in.

Choose a suitable location

Before you can even think about holding an Easter egg hunt, you will need to find a suitable place in which to hold it. For small children, a garden is ideal – particularly if you happen to have access to a large secure garden, or another suitable plot of land. Public parks are also ideal – but you’ll need to be clear about where, exactly, the eggs will be hidden.

Adult supervision

Needless to say, if you are planning an Easter egg hunt for small children, then adult supervision will be required. Of course, supervising an activity which necessitates that the participants spread out over a large area is no easy task. You should therefore seek to recruit plenty of adults – and instruct any older children to keep an eye on the younger ones.

Set up a boundary

Your Easter egg hunt should take place within a clearly-defined perimeter. The game might otherwise be impossible and you do not want your Easter egg hunt to turn into a missing child hunt. State clearly at the beginning of the game what areas the eggs are hidden in and impose penalties for players straying beyond those limits.

As well as explaining the physical limits of the hunt area, you might also want to make clear the rules of the game. For example, stealing from another player’s basket should be grounds for instant disqualification!

Hand out equipment

Children love being given specialist egg-finding gear. Give them something to store their eggs in – a basket or bag will do. This will make carrying a gigantic horde of eggs even easier and make the activity all the more fun, too.

Choose suitable prizes

If your Easter egg hunt is to be any fun at all, then you will need to hand out rewards. Obviously, these rewards will depend largely on the age range of your Easter-egg hunters, but for the most part chocolate is the name of the game.

If you don’t want to give away chocolate – perhaps you’ve taken a look at the average child’s sugar intake over the Easter weekend – then you might hide other, token objects instead. For example, you might paint an ordinary hen’s egg, which a child can then exchange for other prizes. Book tokens, football cards or Lego sets all make for suitable prizes. Numbering cooked eggs and leading them to a raffle style table at the end can enhance the anticipation of the game.

There are a number of other problems with simply hiding a lot of chocolate eggs. The first is one of proportion. More desirable prizes tend to be larger and therefore easier to find. Less desirable ones, on the other hand, tend to be smaller and therefore more difficult. 

The second stems from nature itself – if you are conducting an outdoor Easter egg hunt, then the eggs will be exposed to the elements. Even in a foil wrapper, an egg can get dirty and wet – it might even prove attractive to the local wildlife.

Some parents might also be concerned about the dangers of poor hygiene associated with planting an egg up a tree, or beneath a flowerbed – however dubious these concerns might be, it is probably best that fake eggs are hidden instead, so that they might be exchanged for real ones.

If you do this, you can hand out larger prizes based on how difficult an egg is to find. For example, if you bury a tiny green egg beneath a shrub, it will prove highly elusive. Do ensure that you keep track of exactly where all the eggs are so that you can collect them all at the end of the round.

What about grown-ups?

While an Easter egg hunt is traditionally seen as a children’s activity, they can be geared toward adults, too – all it takes is a little upscaling. Instead of taking place in a limited outdoor area, you can hold them in a large town and have dozens of people searching for them – on foot and even in cars. You could charge an entry fee for finding them and raise money for a charity of your choice.

Hunts in woodland are hard to manage but great fun. Just because we become adults does not mean we have to ignore the allure of a good Easter egg hunt. The only limitation is really ones imagination.

If you are organising an Easter egg hunt then make sure you prepare well for it and have a ball watching people scramble to collect the most eggs they can and beat their competitors.