“Crack the Easter Code” Easter Egg Hunt

I’d been dreaming this up for for awhile, but once I came up with the plan, executing it was pretty easy. I wanted it to be educational, but fun. It turned out to be super educational and FUN!

1. Choose a hiding place– I chose the place to hide P’s Easter basket first so I could decide how many number/letter codes to make.
2. Write the secret message– I used “Look under mom’s bed.” Five words I was fairly confident he could unscramble (pun intended) and read. Not so many letters that he’d have to search all day for hidden eggs.
3. Gather supplies– You’ll need as many eggs as you will have numbers/letters to decode, card-stock paper, and a glue stick, at the very least. I also bought a special Easter-themed pencil for P to work with while decoding and used some spare curling ribbon to tie up the letter.
4. Make a decoder strip– I downloaded a super cute free font, PC Easter Egg and made a simple alphabet/number code strip in PowerPoint (so much more than a slide maker!).
5. Make numbers– Using the decoder, I “spelled” out the message in numbers, making each word a different color so they’d be easier to sort and decode.
6. Write a letter– Again, I used PowerPoint to create the basic letter, saved it as a jpg file and added details using picmonkey.
7. Print, cut and paste– I cut out the two sides of the decoder, used a glue stick to glue them together, and cut out each number.
8. Hide the eggs!– I rolled up the decoder and put it in one of larger eggs, then filled the rest of the eggs with numbers and hid them.
9. Set out the letter- I rolled P’s letter and tied it with curling ribbon. I attached a tag and his special Easter pencil with another piece of ribbon and set it on the coffee table for him to find first thing Easter morning.

Our son declared this Easter AWESOME and I have to agree. It was so much fun creating the egg hunt. It was even more fun watching P do the egg hunt. He’s already hiding the eggs again so we can have another hunt and I’m already dreaming up next year’s hunt…

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