22 Easter Egg Ideas Every Elementary Teacher Can Use to Engage Their Students

It’s that time of year when the dollar store fills up with plastic Easter eggs, and your teacher brain starts whirring. Wondering how to turn these plastic orbs into educational magic? The Teach Starter teacher team has been percolating ideas for the perfect center activities — from phonics practice to brushing up on math facts to even some STEM challenges. So let’s get into these Easter egg ideas for your classroom, shall we?

Plastic Easter Egg Ideas for the Classroom

Word Work

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!

• Onset and rime of CVC words
• Word families
• Contracted word and expanded version
• Synonyms and antonyms
• Uppercase letters and matching
• Vocabulary words and definitions
• Rhyming words
• Blends and pictures of images that begin with those blends (Not up for drawing? Print out L Blends, S Blends, and more, then use glue dots!)
• Words and numbers of syllables
• 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 verb. Students open their eggs, and they act out the word in a game of charades, with their classmates guessing the correct action word!

Egg Writing

Make writing centers into “egg-cellent” adventures by slipping narrative starters into your plastic Easter eggs and letting students pick at random!

Math Time

Math Matching

You can do plenty of matching games with Easter eggs and numbers too. Give these a try:

• Equation and solution
• Capacity (e.g. 1 gallon and 16 cups)
• Decimal and pictorial model
• Decimal and fraction
• Equivalent fractions
• Digital and analog times

Egg Filling Math 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

The folks at the White House don’t have to be the only ones having Easter egg roll fun! 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!

Extend the activity by directing students to convert their measurements from inches to centimeters or feet to yards. 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 these 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 or sticky tack?

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 write 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.

Try more buoyancy fun with these experiments!

See Easter-time ideas for math, science, ELA, and more!