Easter Egg Language and Literacy Games

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I can’t possibly be the only one who is still stepping over Easter Eggs. This post is long overdue, as Easter was almost a month ago. If your household is like mine, maybe you can repurpose some of those plastic eggs just like we did.

I’m always looking for fun, new ways to target early literacy and language skills with Maya. Of course we play word games, utilize flashcards, puzzles, and the occasional time spent on ABCMouse. Drill and kill can be quite boring though for all parties involved when it comes to letter-sound awareness, phonological awareness, and phonics, so Easter eggs to the rescue.

Last year, we kept the egg hunts going by filling the eggs with small, wooden craft letters and hiding them around the house. Whenever an egg was found, Maya would have to identify the letter, the sound it made, and we would come up with other words that started with the same letter.

This year, we took it up a notch after a student found this Pinterest post during a in-class assignment on creative ways to encourage emergent literacy. The word families are written on one side of the egg and appropriate beginning consonants on the other side. The child then spins the consonants half to create new words as seen in the first picture.

Other ideas to use with plastic eggs:

• Object Counting: write a number on the outside of each egg, then ask the child to fill them with the appropriate number of small objects (e.g., erasers, beads, beans, pom-poms, buttons)
• Egg Painting: break the eggs in half and dip them in paint to create a masterpiece
• Sight Words Hide and Seek: place a sight word inside each egg and then take turns hiding them
• Word Unscramble: place 3 letters in the egg and have your child unscramble them to create simple words
• Opposites Scramble: write opposites on each half of the egg and then have your child find the pairs that go together
• Upper and Lower Case Memory Game: write the letters inside the eggs and play a game of memory to find the pairs
• Rhyming Pairs: write rhyming words on each half of the egg and then have your child find the pairs that rhyme
• Following Directions: print out short 1- and 2-step directions and take turns completing the actions e.g., touch your head, then clap your hands; crawl to the kitchen; slither like a snake)
• Color Patterns: create a pattern using a variety of colored eggs and ask the child to recreate it or to select the next egg in the pattern
• Color Sort: sort the eggs by color in small baskets or buckets

Let us know if you try out any of these activities!