Empty Tomb Easter Centerpiece

My 6 year old's sample

Picture of Book Cover

During Lent this year, we worked on telling the Easter story and the story of the Stations of the Cross and Holy Week during most of our lessons.

Last week, I found a new book at the local Family Christian Bookstore in my area. It is called "Paper Plate Christian Crafts" by Maxine Kenny (link below)

Paper Plate Christian Crafts (Amazon)

We adapted one of the crafts, Jesus Arose, on pg. 111, for our classroom to create Easter centerpieces. These were fairly simple and fun to put together.

I purchased the "bare" Solo brand bowl-type of square plates from the store. For the empty tomb, we had the kids crumpled up 1 or 2 sheets of gray copy paper and make it into a cave type shape. I affixed these with hot glue for the kids. They then cut out a circle from gray cardstock for the rock that rolled away to reveal the empty tomb, and glued to the side of the cave with regular elmer's-type glue.

We used the shapes from the book (Angel, Tree and Mary Magdelene) and had the kids affix thes with elmer's glue (small tabs at the bottom bent backwards allowed them to stand. We then set up a table with all sorts of accessories (stuff we had around the house--craft moss, felt, craft rocks, etc.) and let the kids create their landscapes using more elmer's glue. We ended up with quite the assortment.

At the end of class, we had the kids retell the short story of what happened when the women (including Mary Magdelene) went to the tomb on Easter morning. My six-year old daughter's version is photographed here.