So here we are. Easter is done and you have a bunch of plastic eggs lying around your house. You've probably stepped on at least one... ouch! Time to put them to some good use.
So here we go!
Homemade Weeble Wobbles / Silly Face Makers:
Once you add play dough to a few eggs (see above), use a Sharpie marker to draw a silly face on each. The mouth should be on the bottom piece of the egg. Now you have a bunch of homemade Weeble Wobbles! Unlike store bought Weeble Wobbles, with these, you can swap the bottoms making a variety of silly faces, adding a whole new level of fun!
Glue on string as hair can make them even sillier (just make sure they are not top heavy)!
Note: This can also be a fun way to teach kids about feelings and facial expressions!
Egg Bowling:
Again, start by adding play dough to the bottom of your eggs (as shown above)... 6 eggs for this one. Now set them up in a hallway in a triangle formation. Get a small ball and have fun bowling!
Picture Matching Game:
For this one, you simply cut some stickers in half. Place each half of a sticker on the two halves of an egg so that when you put the egg together the sticker picture is whole again. Use a few different stickers to make it into a picture matching game.
Letter Case Matching Game:
A fun way for kids to practice matching upper and lowercase letters. Put the uppercase letters on the tall/pointy half of the eggs and the lowercase letters on the round/wide half of the eggs. Next, turn each complete egg around and draw a picture (overlapping on both halves) that starts with that letter. The picture acts as a hint OR a way for the child to know that they got the letters matched correctly. It also reinforces the association between the letter and sound that it makes.
Just a note before you start making these... there are 26 letters, so make sure you have 26 eggs first.
Number Matching Game:
This one is simple. Write a number (digit) on one half of the eggs. Write the amount in dots on the other half. Have your kids practice matching them up.
Color Matching:
Color the holder parts of an egg carton to match the colors of eggs that you have. Now, let your tot practice matching the colored eggs to the colored in spots. Right after I made this and took this pic my toddler was doing this matching activity! She loved it!
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| the orange doesn't look very similar in this pic but it is when you see it in person |
Word Maker:
You can use any word family for this activity. Simply put the beginnings of words in any word family on one side of the egg and then the ending on the other. When you twist the two sides the different beginnings match up with the ending making different words to practice reading.
Sound Matching / Auditory Discrimination Practice:
Put different small items in two eggs each (matching sets of two). Now, close the eggs. Have kids shake and listen to the eggs. They have to figure out which eggs match in sound. Doing this gives them practice in deciphering between small differences in sounds like when they hear the sound that the letters M or N make (or other similar sounds).
Snack Container:
GO GREEN! Reuse a few eggs as snack containers in your child's lunch box! You could even create a container of pre-filled plastic eggs. That way, when your child wants/needs a small snack you or they can just grab one!
Other Ideas:
20 Plastic Egg Activities
Awesomely wonderful ideas! The only thing wrong was, they made me a little sad because my babies are too old to benefit from these. All I could come up with, way back when, was to add the smallest plastic eggs I had to the basket of play food for the toy kitchen. My #2 had a blast "cracking" the eggs (taking the two halves apart) and dropping the imaginary contents into a frying pan. Our Fisher-Price kitchen stove even made a frying-pan sizzle! (In between cooking events, the eggs lived in an egg carton, as you showed.) I did sort of use the sensory|auditory part by making the eggs as maracas for the kid band, with buttons or rice inside. And they were good for holding Cheerios, when those were still popular...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words! Glad you liked the ideas!
DeleteI should have included the idea of using them in a play kitchen - will have to add that one later! Thanks!
Eggs good for holding snacks or small toys on car trips?
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome!
ReplyDeleteEven if one half of an egg gets stepped on, you could use the "orphan" halves, turned over with the open part down, like that street game that cheats people -- I forget what it's called -- where you have a button or something underneath and you move it around, saying, "Button, button, who's got the button?" for hand-eye co-ordination or concentration|memory. An egg-half makes a decent cookie-cutter, too, for real or Play Do[ug]h. The smaller ones did have a long life in the toy kitchen|household|shopping cart at our house as well (we had the wonderful sizzling frying pan, too!) -- though I'm another mom saddened by knowing that my babies have grown past these cool ideas. Sigh. But very creative all the same!
ReplyDelete