You could say Easter is the best holiday of the year.  Everyone gets a couple of days off together, the kids are off school for a manageable two weeks and there’s chocolate almost everywhere you turn… what could be better?

April weather can be hit and miss though, so if your egg hunt’s been rained off and your day trip’s been scuppered by showers, you’ll need a few indoor tricks up your sleeve.

Treasure hunts

• Give your child a matchbox (or similar) and ask them to find as many things as they can that fit inside. It will keep them going for hours!
• Try giving each child a simple list of things to collect, such as a yellow leaf, a daisy, a feather and a round stone. You could give them each a small prize for collecting everything on the list.
• Give each child a colour and tell them to find as many things of that colour as they can. Then get them to line them all up from lightest to darkest and marvel at all the different shades.

Holiday scrap book

Keep a visual record of the holidays. Buy or make a scrap book, then simply fill the book with keepsakes and creations. These can be anything from works of art your child has made, to photographs, theatre and cinema tickets, bus or train tickets, party invitations, even simple treasures such as dried flowers, leaves and feathers. Older children can include drawings or accounts of fun days out.

Hatch butterflies

Let your child watch one of nature’s best magic tricks unfold before their very eyes! You can buy a kit online, from www.lifeunearthed.co.uk, which has everything you will need, including five caterpillars and a mesh garden.

You could order your butterfly garden a week or two before the holidays as the life-cycle of the caterpillars is 3-5 weeks.

Clay pictures

Roll out a small piece of clay (available in small blocks from toy shops) into a rectangle. Make one or two holes at the top to hang it from. Then let your child create a picture by pressing beads, shells or sequins into the clay. When it’s dry, thread some ribbon through the holes and hang it up.

Life-size painting

Get a long sheet of paper (you can buy rolls of paper from most toy shops), ask your child to lie on top of it and draw their outline. Then let them colour in their life-size self-portrait with pens or paints.

An Easter treat without chocolate

It’s easy for kids to overload on the chocs and the Rice Krispie nests at Easter, so when they – and their teeth – need a more nutritious nibble, try making this fun Easter Bunny Salad.

You’ll need:

• Pear halves
• raisins
• lettuce
• slices of apple
• dollop of cottage cheese

Place a lettuce leaf on a plate – this is grass for the bunny to sit on. Place a pear half on top for the rabbit’s body. Add raisins for the eyes and nose. 
Then make some ears from the apple slices and pop a little dollop of cottage cheese on the other end to make a cute fluffy tail. Give your bunnies a little slice of carrot to nibble and enjoy the sound of healthy crunching!

Hit the library for some Easter reading

Easter-themed books can give your kids a really lovely flavour of the season and all its associated animals, characters and stories. As you’d expect from Usborne their range of Easter activity and sticker book is superb. For a more traditional yarn, try the Beatrix Potter bunny trilogy: The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies. If your little ones love Spot or Maisie, both authors, Eric Hill and Lucy Cousins, have penned Easter-themed stories. Other highly recommended books include: The Story of the Easter Bunny by Katherine Tegen and Sally Anne Lambert and The Bunny Who Found Easter by Charlotte Zolotow and Helen Craig.