Easter Fun!
Spring has sprung in Texas, and the grocery aisles are stocked with bunnies and colorful eggs. Your kids may be eagerly awaiting the day when they can hunt for eggs in your backyard, and, if your kids are anything like ours, they may want to do this again and again. Now let's turn finding sweets and candy into something more engaging, multisensory, and fun!
We want to share some language building activities that you can create and your child won't even realize they are learning. These can be made appropriate for toddlers all the way through to elementary age.
Let's have some fun incorporating the start of spring into our activities. Here our some of our go to favorite activities:
Plastic Eggs
Plastic eggs offer many learning opportunities. As a teacher I would write capital letters on the tops with a permanent marker and lowercase letters on the bottoms and my students loved matching them up. You can do this with other skills as well - simple addition problems on the top and the answers on the bottom is another example.
You can also print out pictures, words, or sentences on pieces of paper and hide them inside the eggs for your child to open and respond to. For a young child, this might be pictures of common items for them to label, for an older child this could be a one-sentence instruction for them to follow - in this case, the sillier the better! Your child will laugh as they waddle like a duck or hop like a bunny for example.
Sorting can be another fun activity for your child to work on categories. You can hide items inside for your child to open and sort, such as small toys that are animals/vehicles/foods. You can also have them sort the eggs by color or size after they find them, or, you can fill the eggs with varying amounts of something like sand or rice and have them sort by weight.
Scavenger Hunt
Have the child ask questions about where the eggs are hidden. You can respond with prepositional phrases (over,under,behind,below, etc), or the child could tell you where it was hidden after they found it.
Asking WH questions is a challenging skill for young children to learn and this is a fun way to expose kids to these types of questions. “You can say “I don’t know where the egg is hidden, but I know someone who does.” The child can then ask “Who?” You can continue these types of questions with where, what (color/ type of egg). This is a great activity for older kids to be the “helpers” they can hide the eggs and provide the answers.
Prepositional phrases
WH questions
Fun Craft: Bubble Wrap Egg Painting Activity
Materials Needed:
Card Stock Paper (Any paper will work)
Marker
Bubble Wrap
Scissors
Paint
Activities
Draw an egg shape on the card stock
Cut or have your child cut out the egg (card stock is easier for younger children to cut out)
Pour a couple different paint colors onto a paper plate
Using the bubble wrap as a stamp lightly press the bubble wrap into the paint (you want a small amount of paint on the bubble wrap) and then press it onto your egg
