10 Uses for Plastic Easter Eggs

Whether you celebrate Easter, Passover, Ostara or the Spring Equinox, if you have kids it is likely that you have plastic eggs hiding out somewhere in your closet.

I know I do. I promised myself that I would only buy these once, and make sure that we got lots of use out of them (like so many other aspects of our commercialized and stylized holidays, these plastic eggs aren’t the friendliest for the earth).

In honour of my promise, here is a round up of some of the uses we have found for plastic eggs and a link or two to some projects I would love to do this coming spring season!

Sensory Fun
I am not sure if this will have the same interest-holding powers as it did last year, but I find the colour of easter eggs are a great addition to any spring sensory bin. Last year they were a lovely contrast to our cardboard eggs that we painted and coloured ourselves.

Water Fun
These eggs have holes in both ends and are great company in both the sink and bowls of water. They can also be filled with things of varying weight to talk about floating and sinking.

Light Table
I think this might be my favourite fun thing to do with these suckers! We can play for ages with the eggs on the light table. Matching by colour, size and top/bottom is great fun. But, so is building, stacking and sliding.

Literacy and Numeracy Fun
These eggs have a slippery rub-off kind of surface, so come prepared! A Sharpie will do the trick though and in minutes you have a portable, colourful and cheap literacy or numeracy tool. I have a set of these, which increase in difficulty. The basic idea is that you want to provide your children with opportunities to match a variety of different pairs per egg. For example: the same sounds, capital and lower case letters, written number and value. So many options.

Muffin Tin Snack
This is pretty easy and really fun. Depending on the quality of the egg’s closure, you could also pop these little snack-attacks into your bag and head off to the park with a portable little treat. It is the perfect size for nuts, dried fruits and the little chocolate bunnies that Aodhan loves to eat.

Sound Shakers
We had such a great time using these eggs for a Montessori-inspired sound matching activity. I filled the eggs with different sounds (2 per sound) and Aodhan had to shake, listen and match. I used: dried lavender, water beads, coins, plastic beads, and wooden beads. Fun!

Outdoor Hunts
As the weather has been warming up we have been spending more and more time outdoors. One of Aodhan’s favourite things to do right now is to have one of us hide all of his eggs in the back garden so that he can find them. This is great for kinesthetic learning and it always ends in giggles.

Dress Up
Who doesn’t love throwing on some bunny rabbit ears and bouncing around the room? The eggs are a great addition to our dress-up baskets. (In the photo, they are hiding under the balls).

Pretend/Imaginary Play
Slightly divorced from Dress-Up Play, Aodhan likes to use these eggs to pretend that he is a mama duck, and that these are his babies. I adore to see how this play fosters nurturing and gentle behaviour. He also likes to pass them out and tell us exactly what will hatch (baby elephant anyone? how about a baby aligator?)

Easter/Spring Countdown
Ages ago, Eighteen25 posted about the idea of an easter/spring countdown. Similar to an advent calendar, a family can fill the eggs with different things and crack one open every morning in anticipation of easter. We are definatley doing this and here are some of the things I am going to put in Aodhan’s eggs:

• little poems written out on paper
• finger puppets
• homemade playdough
• little plastic animals

Please feel free to add any of your own ideas in the comments – I would love to hear them!