It’s springtime in Texas, which means the grass is growing, trees are budding, flowers are blooming, and stores everywhere are selling plastic eggs! These fun, brightly colored eggs offer numerous opportunities for engaging, play-based learning activities for children of all ages. Whether you celebrate Easter or not, these activities are great for all families!
For Early Childhood Children (ages 2-4)
- Hide eggs around the house and use prepositional phrases to direct children where they are (under, behind, inside, on top, next to). This is a fun way to work on learning prepositions. You can even switch roles by having them hide the eggs and give you the clues!
- Hide small objects or toys inside eggs and then sort the objects by color, shape, size, etc. This in an early math skill as well as a language-based activity.
- After an egg hunt, sort them by color, then count how many are in each group.
- Draw shapes on the tops and bottoms of the eggs. Then, mix the pieces up and have your child find the matched pairs.
- Use kitchen tongs to transfer eggs from a basket into an egg carton. This works to strengthen their hand muscles needed for handwriting.
For Preschool and Kindergarten Children (ages 4-6):
- Hide objects or toys inside eggs and sort by shape, color, size, function, category (bugs with wings, bugs without wings, etc.).
- Draw uppercase letters on the tops and lowercase letters on the bottoms of the eggs. Then, mic the pieces up and have your child find the matching letters.
- Hide small toys/beads/snacks inside the eggs. Then practice counting and compare which eggs have more or less of the objects.
- Hide the eggs, sort them by color, then compare which groups have more, less or equal amounts. You can even make a bar graph to chart the eggs by color.
For Lower Elementary Children (ages 6-9)
- Make a scavenger hunt for children to find the eggs by writing out clues for them to follow. Clues can be as tricky or as simple as you want.Examples:
- The first clue is in Daddy’s old shoe
- I’m in a drawer you can reach, hiding in what you wear to the beach!
- Hop to the place the dishes go back!
- Spring means lots of beautiful flowers, check behind the place that tells the hours.
- Place small toys/beads/snacks inside the eggs and practice counting. Next, add the objects from two or more eggs together.
- Write high frequency or sight words inside the eggs and hide them. After they find a word, have your child read it and/or match it to a list.
- Cut an egg carton so it has only 10 spots (not 12) to make a tens frame. Next, roll a pair of dice and place the number of eggs shown on the dice into the egg carton. If you have two egg cartons, you can roll twice and add the numbers together to work on adding up to 20.
- Write word family endings on the larger part of the egg. Write single letters all around the smaller side of the egg. Spin the egg to create and read the words.For Example:
- Write “at” on the larger side of the egg.
- Around the smaller side of the egg, write b, c, f, h, m, n, p, r, s.
- Then have your child spin the word and practice forming the words bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, mat, pat, rat and sat.* For an added challenge, use more complex word endings like -ing or -ate, or use consonant clusters as the beginning like bl, cr, sn, sl, tr with the ending -ack.
With a little bit of creativity, these plastic eggs can be used for so much more than just holding candy!