What to do with all those eggs!

Easter is over, the sugar rush is wearing off and the nagging question arises...
What do you do with all of those plastic eggs?
You have colored ones, sports ones, polka dotted ones, striped ones, large ones & small ones more eggs than you know what to do with. So here are a few ideas to transform those plastic Easter eggs into fun learning games for your little ones both at home and at school. So get your sharpies and your stickers out and get ready to re-purpose those eggs!

Letter Matching

 Use a sharpie to write a lower case letter on the bottom half and and the matching upper case letter on the top half
Little ones will practice matching upper case and lower case letters.

Word Families

 Use a sharpie to write (an, and, am, ot) on the bottom half of the eggs. Write letters on the top half that will spell words that are in the same word family. For example (pan, man, tan, can, fan, ran)

Initial Sounds

 This is a game played like memory, after making the eggs just put them all in a pile for little ones to try to match. You can use small cut out pictures ( like from a magazine) or small plastic toys and small wooden or plastic letters.
For example:
C  in one egg and a plastic cat toy in another
A in one egg and a plastic apple toy in another 
D  in one egg and a plastic dinosaur toy in another
Little ones try to match the item with the initial sound that they hear. This is a great game to play with partners. It is a great review for speech sounds and initial consonants.

You can also use stickers of objects like a flower or a bee and have them match the letter to the sticker showing the initial sound.

Number Words

  Little ones can match the written word (three) to the numeral (3) and for an added bonus put the number of jelly beans inside for them to count so they can build their one to one counting correspondence. Touching each jelly bean as they count them.

 Math Mania

  Little ones match the addition or subtraction problem to the correct answer by matching the egg.

You can use addition. subtraction, multiplication or division problems depending on the age and skill level.

Simply write the problem on one half of the egg and the answer on the other half. separate eggs and have your child or student try to find all the matches. Add a level of difficulty by giving your little ones a time limit. By using a timer it will help them to increase their speed and accuracy.

Compound Words

  Little ones match words up to create compound words (sunshine, rainbow, cupcake, highchair, wheelchair) To enhance their understanding of compound words have them use their new words in a sentence, verbally for your younger ones and written for our older friends.

Egg Sort

  Eggs today have gotten pretty fancy. There are small eggs, large eggs, sports eggs, animal print eggs, metallic eggs,  polka dotted eggs, striped eggs, colored eggs the list could go on and on. Have your little one sort their eggs by patterns, colors sizes etc.

You could even write the color words onto the eggs to start introducing those color sight words or for your older children introduce juicy color words.....like flamingo pink, flaming orange, lemon yellow and sky blue. These descriptive color words will not only enhance their vocabulary it will also help them to be more descriptive in their writing.

How do you reuse your Easter eggs? We would love to hear from you, leave us a comment!