Skip to Content

Easter Gardens

Easter Gardens provides Bible passages and questions to guide your group as they work to retell the Easter story through the reflective creation of their own Easter Garden. Alternatively, the downloadable session plan can be emailed or printed out and sent home with pupils to support conversation post-residential in households.   

Ingredients

What you'll need

Leaders

1

Children

Easily scalable to all group sizes 

Prep

  • Read the teaching programme

  • Gather equipment (see below)

Delivery time

1 hour

Session equipment (listed in the teaching programme), including:

  • Seed tray (or equivalent to build the garden in)

  • Trowels and/or soil

  • Strips of cloth

  • Small seed pot for a tomb

  • Other decoration as available in your local outdoors

Method

How to do it

  • Session 1 (40 mins): 
    Retell the Easter story, building up the Easter gardens as you go. Bible passages and questions to consider for each session. 

Downloads:

Outcome

From completing this teaching programme, pupils will: 

Tips:


Rather than undertaking this session on your school residential, you could use the Easter Reflection teaching programme instead and offer this as a post-residential home-learning activity to support pupils as they tell their parents and carers about their time away. 


If you have a large group, you might find it helpful to bring some soil and foraged natural items (e.g. fallen leaves, sticks, stones, seeds) so that everyone can find enough items to support their creativity.


FAQs

As with all outdoor learning, you should follow the principles of foraging in abundance and minimising impact and damage. Pupils should be encouraged where possible not to pick living items, but to use leaves and flowers that have fallen to the ground. 

Depending on where you are doing it, think through:

  • Not touching unfamiliar plants and washing hands after the activity.
  • Which areas are safe to forage in (set boundaries).
  • Scissors or other cutting too safely (though you should be able to forage without this).