Easter Egg Hunt for Older Kids

I have a confession. I typically don’t hide candy in my kids Easter eggs. In fact, I typically don’t put anything in them.

I have taken this course for a few reasons. You can’t hide eggs in the hardboiled ones that we color. And, on more than one occasion, ants have found their way into candy filled plastic eggs. Which is really no fun.

Instead the kids hunt the eggs and then they can eat the stash of candy when they are done.

Which means that I have started taking Easter Egg hiding a little more seriously. Of course we have kept it easy when the kids were/are little. But as the twins get older I have tried different ways to make it more challenging for them. (Yes, I still encourage my teenagers to hunt eggs.) Actually, now part of the twins Easter tradition is to be in charge of hiding the eggs for Littlest. It’s a fun way to keep them interested in his egg hunt.

Last year I made an Easter egg scavenger hunt for the twins, where a clue in each egg led them to the next egg. This year is the first year that they have a cell phone for Easter, so I decided to create a QR code egg hunt. Essentially the kids will find an egg, open it, scan the QR code inside, and a photo will pop up as a clue to the next eggs location.

The first step is take a picture of all the hiding places. Inside the mailbox, in the fruit bowl, in the cats climbing toy. Because they don’t have to see the egg they can be hidden a little harder. We will be Easter egg hunting at my parents house, and it might be raining, so I picked hiding places inside my parents house and outside.

Once all the pictures are taken they need to be uploaded to an online photo hosting site. I put mine in my Google Docs, but you could use Dropbox or others. Once the pictures are uploaded it’s time to make the QR codes, and there are several free QR code generator websites you can pick from. You’ll use the URL link for each photo to put into the QR code generator. I decided to add a little fun and make some of our codes Easter colored.

I downloaded all of my codes, printed them, and then cut them out. One code goes into each egg.

I left one code out as their starting clue to take them to their first egg. Then the clue in the final egg will lead them to the candy stash.

Let the Easter Egg Hunt begin! What are your Easter egg hunting traditions?