It’s that time of year when teachers often end up with a pile of these plastic Easter eggs in their classroom. And no doubt, your teacher brain starts to wonder how to turn these plastic orbs into educational magic?
The Teach Starter teacher team has been percolating ideas for the perfect activities — from phonics to brushing up on maths facts to even some STEM challenges.
Plastic Easter Egg Ideas for the Classroom
Word Work
We’ll start things off with some ideas for English teachers to make use of all those extra plastic eggs!
Egg Matching
Grab the fine point markers, and your Easter eggs, because we’re going to start with matching activities to hone those language skills. For each of these, you’ll write one thing on the top of the egg and another thing on the bottom. Students then match them together. The options for what you can write is endless, but here are a few to get you started:
- Onset and rime of CVC words
- Word families
- Synonyms and antonyms
- Uppercase letters and matching
- Vocabulary words and definitions
- Rhyming words
- Words and the numbers of syllables in them
- Compound words (e.g. lady and bug to make ladybug)
Egg Charades
Add an action element to your Easter egg ideas if you’re working on verbs. Fill each egg with a piece of paper that has a particular verb written on it.
You can hold an egg hunt or simply hand out eggs. Either way, students will open their eggs, and they act out the word in a game of charades with their classmates guessing the correct action word.
This makes a great small group activity when you’re working on different parts of speech.
Egg Writing
Turn writing lessons into ‘egg-cellent’ adventures by slipping narrative starters into your Easter eggs and letting students pick at random. Again, this activity can be run as a traditional egg hunt with students finding eggs, or you can fill a basket with the different eggs for students to choose from. When they open up their eggs, they have a fresh starter to get to work on their narrative writing practice.
Maths Time
Maths Matching
English isn’t the only subject area that opens up matching game potential. You can set up plenty of matching games with Easter eggs and numbers too. Give these a try:
- Equation and solution
- Capacity
- Decimal and fraction
- Equivalent fractions
- Digital and analogue times
Egg-Filling Maths Challenges
For younger students, write a number on each egg, and provide them with manipulatives they can use to fill the egg with the correct number of items. This can easily be altered if you’re teaching about currency by writing an amount of money on each egg and having students fill them with plastic coins to make exact change.
Egg Roll Distance Measurement
This plastic Easter egg idea will require a bit of space, and you’ll need to pull out a measuring tape as well as some masking tape to mark off the starting line and finish line for their eggs. The goal of the game? See who can roll their egg the farthest!
You can also add a STEM element by encouraging students to add items to their eggs, predicting what sorts of items will make the egg roll farther or weigh it down.
Try a differentiated Easter egg hunt activity for math!
Serious STEM
Get kids thinking outside the … egg … with a few of our teacher team’s favourite STEM Easter egg ideas.
Egg Towers
Hand out plastic eggs, and challenge your students to create the tallest tower of egg ‘shells’ to build their design thinking and engineering skills. Before building their towers, students should follow through on the parts of the scientific method, making a prediction of what they think will happen and describing how they plan to build their tower and why. Challenge them to use other items in the classroom — for example, can you make it taller or a different design by using playdough?
After towers are built (and many come crashing down!), have your students follow up by writing out their observations and describing what went right or wrong!
Grab a design your own experiment template to help kids prepare or a science recording template to jot down notes as they build their towers!
Floating Eggs
Demonstrate the concepts of buoyancy and density with an Easter egg float or sink challenge! Provide students with plastic Easter eggs and various materials of varying weights such as small stones, dice, coins, feathers, jellybeans, mini marshmallows etc., and challenge students to fill their eggs with items, then test whether their eggs sink or float in a bowl of water.
Check out this buoyancy experiment for kids too!
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