Everything you need to fill the bank holiday weekend with hands-on, joyful play, from basket hunts in the hallway to garden games in the spring sunshine.
You do not need a single screen, a complicated craft kit, or a laminated activity plan to give your baby or toddler a genuinely rich Easter. A cardboard box, a handful of plastic eggs, a wooden toy and thirty minutes in the garden will do more for your child's developing brain than almost anything a tablet can offer at this age. That is not a lifestyle opinion; it is what decades of developmental science consistently show. The simplest, most hands-on play available to you this weekend is also, by the evidence, the best play available to you this weekend.
If you have been looking for permission to put the devices away and simply play, consider this it. The activities below are organised by age, by location and by how much energy you have, because the bank holiday does not always cooperate with anyone's idea of a calm, well-rested parent.
Easter arrives at precisely the right moment in the British calendar. The light is back, the garden is waking up, and there are at least two days with no particular obligation attached to them. For families with children under five, that combination is rare and worth using deliberately. The season hands you natural invitations to play: eggs to find, colours to name, textures to explore, and the particular outdoor freedom that only arrives once winter finally retreats.
None of this requires an elaborate set-up. It simply requires the decision to begin.
The case for screen-free, hands-on play with young children is one of the most robustly supported findings in developmental psychology. Researchers Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff have spent careers demonstrating that playful learning, rooted in physical exploration and face-to-face interaction, produces stronger outcomes in language, attention and executive function than passive media consumption at equivalent ages. Their work sits alongside findings from Gopnik, whose research frames the infant brain as among the most powerful learning machines in nature, one that extracts meaning from objects, faces and responsive adults in ways no screen can replicate.
What the evidence says about toys and talk
Research by Hart and Risley established that the quality of language a child hears during everyday play is one of the strongest predictors of later vocabulary and literacy. Narrating a simple egg hunt, "that one is blue, this one is hiding behind the flowerpot," is genuinely developmental work, not just pleasant chatter.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 18 months have no screen exposure beyond video calls, and that children aged two to five have no more than one hour per day of high-quality, co-viewed content. The bank holiday weekend is a natural opportunity to reset well within those guidelines without any sense of deprivation, because the alternatives on offer are simply more enjoyable.
Babies do not need Easter to mean anything conceptually; they need it to mean texture, colour, sound and your face. Start with a simple sensory basket: fill a low basket or washing-up bowl with items that are safe to mouth, a wooden egg, a scrap of yellow fabric, a small smooth ball, a crinkled piece of foil, a sprig of dried lavender sewn into a muslin square. Sit on the floor and hand objects to your baby one at a time, narrating as you go.
Babies aged around eight to twelve months will love a rudimentary hiding game: place a bright plastic egg under a tea towel and let them pull it away. This is not a trivial game; it builds object permanence, the understanding that things continue to exist when out of sight, a cognitive milestone Piaget identified as foundational to all later reasoning.
For tummy time, arrange a small row of coloured eggs just out of reach to encourage reaching and pivoting. Fifteen minutes of this is both developmental exercise and, for many babies, genuinely absorbing entertainment.
Toddlers between eighteen months and three years are in what Vygotsky described as a zone of proximal development, constantly reaching just past their current ability with the support of a nearby adult. Easter provides endless scaffolded challenges: sorting eggs by colour, nesting plastic eggs inside one another by size, carrying a basket without dropping its contents, unwrapping something with their own fingers.
In the kitchen, involve your toddler in any Easter baking at a level appropriate to their ability. Pouring pre-measured flour, pressing cutters into dough, stirring a bowl with a wooden spoon: these are all fine motor activities that build the hand strength and bilateral coordination that later supports writing. They also produce something edible, which is its own reward.
A living-room egg hunt requires no garden. Hide ten plastic eggs around the sitting room while your toddler waits in the hallway. The anticipation, the search, the triumph of finding, and the counting of the haul afterwards are each independently valuable. Trawick-Smith's research on the quality of play materials consistently finds that open-ended, low-structure activities of exactly this type outperform expensive, single-function toys for sustaining engagement and building cognitive flexibility.
A note on attention spans
Toddler attention is not broken when it moves on quickly. Pellegrini's research on free play finds that short, self-directed bursts followed by a change of activity are the natural rhythm of healthy early childhood exploration. Follow your child's lead rather than extending an activity past its natural end.
If the weather allows even a short window outside, use it. Sandseter and Brussoni's work on outdoor play demonstrates that physical challenges in natural environments build risk assessment, confidence and emotional regulation in ways that are difficult to replicate indoors. You do not need to do anything dramatic: a slightly uneven patch of lawn, a flower bed to peer into, a path to walk along carrying a basket are genuine physical and cognitive challenges for a two-year-old.
An outdoor egg hunt is the obvious centrepiece, but consider extending it. After the eggs are found, can your toddler roll one down a gentle slope? Can they balance one on a spoon? Can they find a natural object, a pebble, a stick, a leaf, to put inside each egg? Louv's work on nature-deficit disorder reminds us that even brief, regular contact with natural outdoor environments has measurable benefits for children's attention and wellbeing.
Traditional outdoor games translate beautifully to an Easter theme. A set of Jaques outdoor games gives you equipment built to last through many Easters to come, with none of the battery-replacement anxiety of electronic alternatives.
There is a reason wooden toys have been part of childhood for centuries. They are tactile, durable, open-ended and developmentally generous across a wide age range. A simple wooden stacker becomes an Easter tower when the rings are colour-sorted to match a row of eggs. A set of wooden skittles becomes an Easter bowling alley with egg-shaped targets drawn on paper and propped behind each pin.
Dauch and colleagues found that toddlers who played with fewer, simpler toys during a given period engaged in longer, more creative play episodes than those given many complex options. A well-chosen wooden toy is not a nostalgic indulgence; it is evidence-based generosity. The Jaques wooden toys collection spans ages and stages, and many pieces will still be in use when your toddler starts school.
Jaques of London has been making play equipment since 1795, longer than any other games company in the world. That continuity is worth something: the designs have survived not through marketing but through the straightforward fact that children keep enjoying them.
If you read this on the morning of Good Friday with no eggs hidden, no activities planned and a toddler already restless before nine o'clock, please hear this: the bar is lower than you think, and the research supports that reassurance. Suskind's work on early language and interaction shows that responsive, conversational engagement during ordinary moments, dressing, washing up, walking to the corner shop, is among the most powerful developmental inputs available. The Easter egg hunt you throw together in ten minutes is enough. The cardboard box your toddler plays in for forty minutes is enough. You, paying attention, narrating and playing alongside your child, is enough.
Screen-free does not mean perfectly curated. It simply means present.
Not at all. Plastic eggs from the supermarket, cardboard boxes, kitchen utensils and fabric scraps provide everything a toddler's brain needs to engage in rich exploratory play. That said, a well-made wooden toy will outlast the Easter weekend by years and tends to invite more varied, sustained play than single-purpose novelty items. If you are investing in something new, choose open-ended over themed, and simple over complex.
The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines suggest children under 18 months avoid screens almost entirely, and two-to-five-year-olds have no more than one hour daily of co-viewed content. In practice, a screen-free morning followed by a calm afternoon, or a full day outdoors on Easter Sunday, meets and comfortably exceeds those recommendations. There is no need for an all-or-nothing approach; even a four-hour screen-free window filled with active, social play is meaningful.
Mouthing is a primary sensory channel for babies and very young toddlers, and it is entirely normal. Good-quality wooden toys finished with non-toxic, water-based paints are safe for mouthing. Always check that pieces are large enough to pose no swallowing risk, that there are no sharp edges, and that the finish is intact. If a toy shows signs of wear, sand and re-seal rather than discard. For babies under twelve months, choose pieces that are at least the size of a closed adult fist.
No. Short bursts of self-directed engagement are developmentally appropriate and healthy. Pellegrini's research on free play, alongside Gray's work on self-directed learning, consistently finds that children extract the most cognitive and emotional benefit from play when they lead it themselves. If your toddler abandons the egg hunt after three eggs and starts using the basket as a hat, that is not failure; it is creative play in progress. Follow them rather than redirect them back to your plan.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.