Monday, March 12, 2012

5 Easter Egg Learning Activities

Neon and pastel plastic eggs hit the shelves every year in...February? They are inexpensive, and once Easter is over, easter egg halves seem to find their place under the sofa, in the toy box, in my purse, the bathtub, and any other place where you swear you have cleaned and de-cluttered 5 times already and they keep showing up. My suggestion, save them. As soon as the candy is out, collect them for some fun learning activities. I couldn't wait so bought them and I'm using them already.  On Easter, my boys hopefully won't notice that they have letters drawn in sharpie on their eggs. I'm sure in their zombie like hunt for candy they wont even pause to notice the Capital "A" and lower case "a" on their eggs.  Until then, they are going to learn their letters and colors, letter sounds etc. all using the eggs.

5 Easter Egg Learning Activities


1. Capital "A" and lower case "a"

Using a permanent marker, write the upper case letter on one half of the egg, and the lower case letter on the other half. I put them all in a bowl seperated from each other and have my son match the letters together. If you want to make it more challenging you can put the matching letters on different colored egg halves rather than the same color as shown.

2. What starts with "A"?
I tried to look for small pictures that I could print out then cut into pieces to fill each egg with of items matching each letter of the alphabet....Then I remembered the alphabet flash card pack I got at the dollar store, had a "cheat sheet" in the pack that showed each upper and lowercase letter and a picture. So I cut them up and placed each letter/picture in each matching egg. Shown Below:



3. Hide and Seek sounds
T is for Turtle. For a game, you can "hide" the eggs around the house, the kids can find them. Once found, you can talk about what starts with the letter on the egg. **If you can hide the eggs near items beginning with that letter, it would be even better but is sometimes difficult.


4. Pick an egg, any egg!

I put all of the matched eggs in a bowl and my son picks one out at a time, he tells me what letter is on the egg and he thinks of a word that starts with the letter. Then he writes down the letter he chose and I write out the corresponding word he thought of and he copies the word.

5. Color matching for the little ones

For my 2 year old son, who refuses to be left out, I give him a bowl of un-matched eggs and show him how to match the colors together. I put two together that don't match and in my silly mom voice, I say "Do these look the same? do they match?" He laughs and says "Noooo!" Then I put together two matching halves and say "Do these look the same? Do they match?" he laughs and says "Oh yeah!" Then I ask him to put them together, make them look the same, or match. He attempts to match the color, sometimes he does sometimes the eggs become a caterpillar etc. either way he is still developing fine motor skills etc.

Here are some other ideas I found on Pinterest that use plastic Easter eggs as well: Play Create Explore and Here

Enjoy!

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