What makes a great Easter egg hunt? Share your tips and experiences with Cadbury and you could win a £200 Love2Shop voucher NOW CLOSED

[AngelieMumsnet]

With Easter falling early this year, we're already planning ahead, and Cadbury are looking to hear Mumsnetters’ experiences of Easter egg hunts.

What do you think makes a great Easter egg hunt? Does your family have any traditions - perhaps you base the event on memories from your own childhood Easters? Do you (or the Easter bunny) put together a treasure map or cryptic clues to help find the hidden eggs - and to make the hunt last more than five minutes! Will there be a star prize - or specific eggs to find, so everyone gets a fair share? How do you add to the eggsitement - and more importantly, how can you prevent any arguments or jealousy between the children?!

Whether you’re a fan of traditions or planning an all day eggstravaganza (sorry!), share your egg hunt tips - and your family's favourite Easter experiences - and you will be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will win a £200 Love2Shop voucher.

Please note your comments may be included on Cadbury's pages on MN, their social media channels, and possibly elsewhere, so please only post if you're comfortable with this.

Thanks and good luck,
MNHQ

I love (and the kids) a treasure map. It's essential. I try and equalise the prizes as some are better finders than others. Also hot chocolate on offer for the hunters. Sometimes we go up to the fell and do a treasure hunt, a bit more exciting.
Would love it if someone kind benefactor put eggs in geocache locations, now that would be the ultimate egg hunt!
(I think that may have happened in the lakes last year)

1. The bigger kids always find more eggs than the little ones, so give the dcs a colour of egg that's theirs and make sure you lay the same number of each colour, hiding the bigger dcs colours in the harder places.

1. You will never ever remember where each hiding place is in the garden and will be finding chocolate eggs for months to come under flower pots etc, so take a photo on your phone of each hiding place as you hide them.

1. Treasure hunts take hours weeks to plan and write the clues and only seconds to complete. They don't work for big groups of dcs because one clever clogs solves all the clues and races off before the others even reach the previous clue. So make a rule that the last child to reach the next clue is the one who has to read/ solve the next (with help if needed).

I always used to creep out into the garden really early and hide the eggs in the bushes and trees etc. Then when the children got up, I would say I saw the Easter bunny earlier in the garden and would they like to go out and see if he left any eggs. They always believed me because of course when they went out they eventually found some eggs, sometimes with a little help. They used to enjoy believing in the bunny almost as much as Santa!

At my church they hide different coloured ink pads next to little egg stamps. The children get an activity sheet after the service and have to find the hiding places and collect a stamp of every colour, which they can then exchange for chocolate eggs.

A treasure hunt in the garden which the kids usually complete in 2 minutes

Loads of small eggs, loads of facepaint, lots of dressing up options, lots of music and LOTS of fun!

Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate black or milky. "Once a chocolate, always a chocolate"

Great weather - so they can go outside - roll on summer!

as a child, Easter was always joint with my cousins. We would spend the weekend together and the Easter egg hunt was a very important part of the weekend!

Both sets of parents would combine and write a selection of rhyming clues for us to solve. The cheesier the better. As we got older, the difficulty increased. The clue would lead to a collection of mini eggs (or if we were lucky bigger creme egg sized prizes), one for each person, where there would be a another clue. The final clue would lead to our 'big eggs'. Great fun, put our minds to work, and everyone had equal chocolate.

Now we are older, and some cousins with their own children, we often try to get the family together for Easter again. These days the adults write a set of clues for the children (some of the children may be fully fledged adults but still get called children for the purposes of Easter) and then the children write a set of clues for the adults. Same rules apply, mini eggs in with each clue, and the final clue leads to the big eggs

Every year we try to get trickier, and puns are universally popular!

i hide little eggs around the house, give kids a basket and let them hunt for them, as they are getting older i have to find harder places to hide them

a good egg hunt includes lots and lots of eggs haha. weve had hunts with a large egg being hidden alongside lots of little eggs including toys such as chicks and lambs etc.

Rhyming clues and a hunt that takes them up and down stairs, inside and outside to tire them out!

We hide some in the house and some in the garden and each child has a space of their own to explore first before hitting the garden. In the garden we colour code the eggs, some for each child, and some are a free for all

When we were children my mum would design elaborate easter egg hunts with rhyming cryptic clues for each step that would lead us to all the rooms of the house and garden. I remember once a clue led us to the computer where she had programmed a simple game we had to complete to get the next clue! As we got older the clues involved solving more complex problems to get the prizes.

The annual easter egg hunt at grandad's house is THE event of the year for our family!

The keys to it's success (learnt by trial and error over the years) are:
Ensure the dog is indoors before hiding the chocolate eggs!
Make sure there are plenty of eggs
Label each egg with a sticker (or a favourite character) so that each child looks for only 'their' eggs.
Have a variety of different types, sizes of eggs (I hate the cheap chocolate ones that taste gross so quality is important)
If rainy weather means the egg hunt moves indoors, then don't hide the chocolate by the radiator and then forget where you put it only to find it months later!!! (granny did that)
Nice large pots to gather the eggs in.
Wellies for the garden to keep feet dry.
Borrow a large garden as its more fun (hence we go to granny and grandads)

We've never needed clues or a trail as the kids love it just as it is. But having been to a badly organised one where all the kids rushed out and about 2 kids raided all the eggs so none left for the younger kids, then the allocated eggs system works really well to make it fair so that sort of thing doesn't happen.

rule number 1, keep the dog out of the garden until all of the eggs have been found

We go to a national trust property with an organised Easter egg hunt and make a day of it with a picnic

A treasure hunt map is always a treat, helps makes the hunt entertaining and the kids learn great problem solving skills too!

We didn't start doing Easter Egg hunts until the DC were reasonably old. We've never really had traditions like that - my family isn't at all religious and DH comes from a Greek Orthodox background so his family does separate things for that usually on a completely different date (only coincides every 4 years) We never even used to buy eggs as they got far too many from everybody else!

Anyway... not sure what made us start doing it, but now it's my job to hide many many tiny eggs plus a couple of cadbury's creme eggs in as many evil and hard to reach places in our flat as I can. The idea is that the 'hunt' actually ends up lasting days with odd eggs popping up when least expected. Our record was one turning up in a drawer a month afterwards! Not sure it'd work with little DC but mine are 12, 15 and 18 and like the challenge

Easter egg hunts weren't really a thing when I was little, but we are coming up with our own traditions. I like the National Trust ones, because it is all organised and you get wee games to do. But this year I might just steal a few ideas from this thread, like the idea of hiding the fluffy chicks and of mixing fake and chocolate eggs, to add some extra excitement.

We've done an Easter egg hunt for dd since she was little, with clues to follow to chocolate treats around the garden (or in the house if the weather is really bad, although we've done it out in the snow before now!)

Wearing lovely furry bunny ears is a given and when dd was younger we'd draw picture of places the choc was hidden, as she got older she'd have a rhyming puzzle to solve (bit of a challenge for us parents some of those!) and now there may even be a maths question or a puzzle in German or French. Mind you, she is a teenager now. And will still wear furry bunny ears in return for chocolate

We do a treasure hunt with clues on each egg which leads you to the next! Also a few big eggs which are hidden in obscure places such as up trees! We try to put a 'surprise' element in it each year!

We did our all time fav hunt last year as the kids were old enough (2 and 3). We put out really easy clues for the kids to follow and then once they find all their clues they come back and get a coloured dot from us then they have to go out in the garden and find all the eggs with their colour dot on! They loved it and there was no arguing over who's was who's!!

make it challenging :) xx

We have an annual Easter Egg Hunt in our gardens for all the neighbours to enjoy. Every year there is the traditional easter egg hunt with eggs big and small as well as a gigantic Easter Bunny (a neighbours dad) but this year as well we will be doing junk modelling to make a huge Easter Bunny from all the junk we have lying around. There is a lot of it so it is possible the Easter Bunny will be visible from out of space this year!