Have you ever had a ton of leftover plastic Easter eggs and you don’t know what to do with them? Children get so excited over those little plastic eggs and they love to play with them. What a better time, then now to use those eggs to help them learn. You can use them for very simple activities for your toddler to more advance activities for your first grade child. Get ready to have a lot of fun with those little plastic eggs and watch your littles enjoy learning with this Easter favorite.
Little children get so excited with the traditions of the different holidays and they look forward to seeing all the things that they remember from the holiday. Easter eggs are so much fun for children. They love to play with them, what a better way to sneak in some learning when they think they are playing.
Gross Motor Fun for All
An engaging and fun activity you can do with all you children from toddler age up is to fill each egg with an movement activity to do and they can all do it together. In one egg put a slip of paper with: hop like a bunny or waddle like a duck. They get to pick a plastic egg out of the basket and do the movement inside. Check out my set of movement activities with the link below.
Toddler Fun 
Let’s start with our toddlers, they love plastic eggs and playing with them.
- Toddlers are learning their colors, this is a great time for them to practice matching colors. Give them the plastic eggs broken apart and have them match the colors. Some nice fine motor practice would have them putting the eggs back together. This may be difficult for the young toddler, but can a great chance for you to help your child put them back together. You can also give them the whole egg and sort them into separate baskets by color.
2. Another fun activity is to have different size eggs. you can have them together or apart. They can either sort all the large eggs into one basket and the small eggs into another basket, or take the eggs apart and have your child match the large pieces and small pieces together to put the eggs back together. For older toddlers, they can match size and color.
Preschool and Kindergarten Fun
- If your child is learning their letters, write the capital letter on the large side of the egg and the lowercase letter on the smaller side of the egg. break the eggs apart. Have your child find the letter matches. Start with 5 letters and move up from their as they know more letters. Make it something they can come back to after they match a few. I always ask that you start with the letters in your child’s name if they are just learning letters and work on other letters as they learn the letters in their name.
2. For this activity you will need an empty egg carton and 12 plastic eggs. Write the numbers 1- 12 in the egg carton (each hole gets it’s own number) then write one number, 1-12, on each egg. Have your child put the eggs away by matching the numbers on the eggs to the numbers in the egg carton.
3. This next activity needs the plastic eggs and jellybeans or some other small objects. Write a number on each egg, you can start 0-10 and go to 20 as your child can do it. Place the jellybeans in a bowl, have your child read the number on the egg and put that many jellybeans inside the egg. This is great for number recognition, one-to-one correspondence, and counting and your child will be having fun!
Kindergarten and 1st Grade Fun
- For this activity you need plastic eggs and a sharpie. On the small end of the egg write the ending of word families such as un, at, ot, et, it, op, igh, ight, ish, uck, ack, ake ect. On the larger side of the egg write letters that will begin words in that word family (s un, f un, r un, b un, st un, sp un). Your child will have fun turning the egg and reading the words. You can add having them read and write the word. Writing the word in a tray of sand is even more fun. Have a basket of different word family eggs to help your child go to and practice their words.
2. For this activity you will need plastic eggs, sharpie, and jellybeans. Write the numbers 0-10 to start with, you can add 11-20 as your child gets better at this. Write 0 on one egg and put nothing in it, on the next egg write 1 on the egg and put 1 jellybean in it, then write 2 on the next egg and put two jellybeans in it. Continue this until you have all 10 eggs completed. Then your child picks and egg out of the basket, reads the number on it, counts to make sure it has the correct number of jellybeans in it, then they use the jellybeans to come up with different ways to make the number (you can have them write them down if you like. (pick egg 5, say the number, count the jellybeans, 0 and 5, 1 and 4, 2 and 3, 3 and 2, 4 and 1, 5 and 0, 1 and 1 and 1, and 1, and 1) You can have them use the + sign if they know what it means.
Watch for more Easter Fun Activities for you and your child in future posts. For now have fun with those plastic eggs.
