Looking for new plastic Easter egg activities to put these colourful items to good use in your lesson plans? You have hopped on over to the right place!
If there’s one thing teachers have heaps of around Easter, it’s plastic eggs. With that in mind, the Teach Starter teacher team has been percolating ideas for the perfect plastic egg activities to use in the classroom — from using these colourful Easter items to practise phonics to brushing up on maths facts to even some STEM challenges.
Read on for a tonne of fun ways to use these ubiquitous holiday items in maths, English and plenty more. We’ve even included some printable ideas you can pair with your plastic Easter egg activities to fill out your lesson planning. Read on for our favourite ideas!
Plastic Easter Egg Activities for English Teachers
We’ll start with some ideas for English teachers to use all those extra plastic eggs! If you don’t have extras in your classroom storage or collection, you can find some at Kmart, Spotlight or BigW.
Match Eggs
Grab the fine point markers, and your Easter eggs, because there are heaps of fun matching activities that can be done with Easter eggs to help your students 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)
Play Verb 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.
Hide Writing Prompts in Your Eggs
Turn writing lessons into ‘egg-cellent’ adventures by slipping narrative starters into your Easter eggs and letting students pick at random.
Once 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.
Plastic Easter Egg Ideas for Maths Teachers
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
Complete 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.
Roll Eggs to Practise 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.
Plastic Easter Egg STEM Activity Ideas
Get kids thinking outside the … egg … with a few of our teacher team’s favourite STEM Easter egg ideas.
Test Filled Eggs to Determine What Will Float (or Not)
Are you teaching the physical sciences this year? Why not demonstrate the concepts of buoyancy and density with an Easter egg float or sink challenge?
Show a simple demonstration with a plastic egg filled with nothing but air and another filled with a heavy material such as small stones. Discuss the differences in their behaviour in water.
Break students into groups, and provide each group with plastic Easter eggs and various materials of varying weights, such as small stones, dice, coins, feathers, jellybeans, mini marshmallows and more. Ask each group to predict whether their eggs will sink or float if they are filled with the available items, and record their predictions.
Challenge students to then experiment by filling their eggs with items, and testing whether the full eggs sink or float in a bowl of water. Students should record the results of each test.
When your class has come back together, you can ask representatives of each group to explain why certain eggs sank while others floated.
Build 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!
You can also use a science recording template to jot down notes whilte students build their towers!
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