Plastic Easter Eggs can be a surprising early learning tool! Stacking, counting, letter recognition, hand-eye co-ordination and more.
My 4 year old has Easter on the brain, mostly because he loves stuffed animals and has some new cosy 'chicks' he's been playing with. This morning he insisted that we get out the plastic Easter eggs so he could make a hunt for his 'cosy guys'…and I suddenly remembered how, from age one and up, my kids have LOVED playing with those inexpensive, recloseable plastic eggs. I was never able to put them away after Easter, and now the story in our house is that the Easter bunny hides them, but we get them out and 'ready' for him each year!
1. Nesting! Seems simple, but kids have to figure out which is the largest, which is the smallest, and how they fit together. Just like stacking/nesting cups. The fun thing about these eggs though is that the little eggs can 'hide' inside the bigger ones – something that never seems to lose its magic!
2. Along the same lines… Easter baskets seem to be in all different sizes, so you can nest these together as well (and then my son made a real 'nest' for his chicks with Easter grass!)
3. This idea I LOVE – and stolen from preschool a few years back! My son came home with an egg carton filled with eggs – all 26 letters of the alphabet! He used them to spell his name, to learn his letters, and to put them in A-B-C order. We've still got them in the house and now my younger son can practice! Just use permanent marker to write the letters on the eggs.
4. A simple idea for those not quite ready for letters… sorting! Sort by colour or by size!
5. Or get a bit fancier and start on some patterning (a big theme in kindergarten!)
Here we did small, big, small, big!
In our house the plastic egg fun just seems to go on and on, so momstown just had to share – if you're looking for a fun way to teach alphabet skills, sorting, patterning – look no further than a $3 bag of plastic eggs!
Got other ideas? – comment and let us know!
