Puzzle Easter egg hunt {fun no-candy egg hunt idea}

In today’s post: This puzzle Easter egg hunt idea is a fun twist on the classic egg hunt that doesn’t involve candy or plastic junk!

I promise that I like candy just as much as the next person (probably more). But it sometimes feels like candy is taking over my kids lives. They get candy for turning in reading charts at school, they get candy for practicing piano, they get LOADS of candy at Halloween and Valentine’s Day and Easter… I’m totally ok with celebrating fun days with a little sugar, but sometimes they still have candy left over from the last holiday when the next one arrives! So I wanted to find a way to have a really fun Easter egg hunt this year that doesn’t involve so much candy.

So I created a puzzle Easter egg hunt.

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Puzzle Easter egg hunt idea

This is really easy! Just head to the dollar store and purchase a puzzle and as many Easter eggs as you’d like to hide. I got a 48 piece puzzle and the pieces fit nicely in the larger size Easter eggs (the 24pc puzzle pieces were too big). You can put one puzzle piece in each egg if you want to hide more eggs, or more pieces per egg if you want to hide less eggs. Click here to download the puzzle hunt instructions and print them out (I printed on cardstock).

Give your kids the first half of the puzzle hunt instructions telling them how many eggs they need to find to make sure they collect all the puzzle pieces:

This card also warns them that there will be puzzle pieces in the eggs so they aren’t disappointed when they don’t find candy. But that’s ok, because completing the puzzle earns a prize!

Kids get to have the fun of an egg hunt…

…then the fun of putting a puzzle together…

…and then even more fun enjoying the prize. The prize could be a family activity, a new coloring book, or even a small toy.

This idea works well if you have multiple kids. They can either search for eggs and complete the puzzle together, or you can use different puzzles for each child and just color code the eggs (one kid gets all the blue and yellow, another the pink and green, etc.) You can even use 100pc or 200pc puzzles to make it more challenging for older kids.

For very young kids who need puzzles that have pieces too big to fit in eggs, you could put pennies in the eggs and then they could “buy” the puzzle from you with their pennies.