Despite the Easter season being a high point in the Church's calendar, there's not a great deal of online resources to help you to reflect on this with your young people. If you find any useful pages and resources that aren't listed below, please let Stephanie know, and we'll try to get them up here so that everybody can use them!

For Discussion and Reflection

Click here for short stories about Easter.  There are several e.g. 'Feed my sheep' - an Easter story of Jesus appearing to the disciples on the Sea of Galilee following His resurrection, and a story about Mary Magdalene's life and witness to Jesus' resurrection. 

Two royalty-free drama scripts and MP3 & PDF music downloads are available from familyworkship.org.uk. A Palm Sunday newsflash script is available from here.

The American Catholic  is quite a comprehensive website for Easter reflections starting from Holy Thursday to the Feast of Pentecost, and including reflections on the Sunday readings.  You can even use this site to send an Easter greeting, listen and view audio and video reflections and explore every aspect of the Eucharist as you celebrate Easter season and the Year of the Eucharist.

The gospel.com site lists a wide variety of Easter resources, including cartoons and humour.

The life4seekers Easter page may give you some ideas and background material, especially for young people relatively unfamiliar with the meaning of Easter…

Photos of Easter story locations in modern Jerusalem available from ebibleteacher.com.

Resources

Religioustolerance.org informs about origines, meanings and different practices of Easter.

On Worshiphousemedia you'll find seasonal images and mini movies.

Case created a range of free Easter downloads as well as a list of links and book tips.

Here you'll find a long list of ecumenical resources for Easter and Holy Week.

A lighter approach to the topic is East Eggstravanganza - ideas for a themed evening of icebreakers, games, activities and a talk with your youth group.

CAFOD prayer pack: a collection of CAFOD's most popular prayers about Easter for you to download.

Songs

Some songs that are recent which you could use to discuss the love demonstrated by Christ's death and resurrection at Easter are:
'I would die 4 U' by Space Cowboy - a cheesy dance remix of Prince's original classic. Don't rely too heavily on the lyrics - you could find yourself denying Jesus' humanity!
'Hero' by Enrique Iglesias - sloppy and sentimental, but nicely upbeat... a love song similar to the Song of Songs...
'If you're not the one' by Daniel Bedingfield - garage-boy goes acoustic with a heartfelt love song, offering up his life...
'Beautiful' by Christina Aguilera - again, uber-sloppy, but quite striking if you used the lyrics to talk about the beauty restored to us through forgiveness...

Films

Many, many films have Gospel themes of death, resurrection and redemption running throughout them, although these are some of the more notable ones:

The Matrix - Neo is resurrected through the all-conquering power of love to beat down the powers and principalities of The Matrix
The Hurricane based on the autobiography of Rubin Carter, played by Denzel Washington, who portrays a man innocent of a crime but is victim of the American justice system. Rubin suffering reminds us of Christ, and his final release 20 yrs later - a symbol of hope - is like Christ's resurrection.
The Shawshank Redemption - Morgan Freeman's character is redeemed by Tim Robbins' character's hope in the face of suffering
The Mission - Robert De Niro's character is cut free from the bonds of penance that he has taken on, by the very people he sinned against
Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers - it's not spoiling the overall plot to let you know that Gandalf returns from death, victorious over the powers of darkness, as a Christ-like figure to lead, guide and bring hope to hopelessness
... and, obviously, The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's visualisation of the events of the original Easter story in all their graphic brutality - to be handled with care as far as young people are concerned, and read up in advance on where some of the stranger elements came from. There is now a “Recut” version which edits  six minutes of the worst violence and might be a bit safer to use.