Easter, also known as Resurrection Sunday, is one of the top two holiest days in the Christian calendar. It commemorates the resurrection of Jesus on the third day of burial, following his crucifixion, and the Christian belief that in doing so, he saved people from their sins. In widespread culture, Easter is also a secular holiday to celebrate spring, commemorated with Easter bunnies, baskets, and eggs.

To help your students learn more about both the religious and secular origins of this holiday, we’ve curated a group of resources to bring Easter activities into your classroom:

• Explore Easter activities
• Discover the history and traditions of Easter
• Do Easter egg-periments

[Explore Easter activities](id-ela)

Use fiction and nonfiction to explore the Christian holiday of Easter with your students through literature:

• First, have students summarize what they know about Easter.
• Then, read “The Basket of Eggs,” a Canadian Christian folktale that explains the religious origins of giving an Easter basket and eggs to celebrate the holiday.
• Finally, explore the history of other Easter traditions in the United States.

[Discover the history and traditions of Easter](id-ss)

Build students’ background knowledge about Easter and start discussions about diverse perspectives with these social studies resources:

Celebrating Easter

Explore the history of Easter and its traditions to provide information about both the secular and religious aspects of the holiday:

• Have students watch an interactive video about Easter celebrations and answer the questions about the topic to check their understanding.
• Learn more about moveable feasts like Easter, which change dates and aren’t celebrated on the same day each year.
• Discover when the White House started holding an Easter egg roll for a religious holiday (instead of separating church and state!)—and some reasons political leaders have canceled the annual event in the past.

Religious celebrations in April

Give your students an overview of the histories and traditions of various religious celebrations that happen during April:

• Discover the similarities and differences among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holidays like Passover, Easter, Ramadan, and Eid al-Fitr.
• Break students into jigsaw groups and assign each group a holiday to study and create a presentation for the class.
• Have students share their presentations with the class using the information from this text set and the others mentioned in this post related to their holiday. Encourage the listeners to ask questions and take notes about information they find interesting.

[Do Easter egg-periments](id-sci)

Turn a traditional Easter symbol into a science experiment with an egg drop activity:

• Learn about the different types of animals and insects that lay eggs.
• Discover why egg hunts are such a popular Easter activity and how they can be adapted for people with differing abilities.
• Find out how sturdy (or fragile!) an egg can be by using engineering skills and building a contraption that protects a raw egg from cracking when dropped from different heights.

Spring into skills practice with just one search

Did you know it’s easy to add additional skills practice to any Newsela lesson with just a search? With our updated skills search filter for Newsela ELA, you can select which skills you want to teach in the classroom and find articles on your topic that match! Plus, with skill labels on each article, you can see at a glance which ones fit your lesson best. Ready to give it a try? Log into your Newsela account and search for Easter content to see how it works!