Celebrating the Spring Equinox with Kids

Some spring craft ideas for kids:

• Assemble a terrarium.

• Decorate ceramic or wooden eggs to use every year.

• Start some seeds growing in a sunny windowsill.

• Make Papier-Mâché Eggs.

Resources for teaching kids about the spring equinox:

• The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth by Ellen Jackson,

• A New Beginning: Celebrating the Spring Equinox by Wendy Pfeffer

More children’s picture books:

• Spring’s Sprung by Lynn Plourde

• Rabbit’s Good News by Ruth Bornstein

• The Sun Egg by Elsa Beskow

• The Golden Egg Book by Margaret Wise Brown

• When The Root Children Wake Up by Audrey Wood and Ned Bittinger

• Rachenka’s Eggs by Patricia Paola

• The Green Man by Gail E. Haley

Child-friendly Ritual idea:

• The World Egg Creation Story During the telling of the following world egg creation story, two participants hold up a large paper egg.  (This can be decorated ahead of time by the kids.)At the end of the story, kids burst through the egg from the other side, bringing fresh or paper flowers to the people in the circle.

“In the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, there is a myth of the world being created from the fragments
of an egg laid by a diving duck on the knee of Ilmatar, goddess of the air:
One egg’s lower half transformed
And became the earth below,
And its upper half transmuted and became the sky above;
From the yolk the sun was made,
Light of day to shine upon us;
From the white the moon was formed,
Light of night to gleam above us;
All the colored brighter bits rose to be the stars of heaven
And the darker crumbs changed into clouds and
cloudlets in the sky.”