Easter eggs

Another special holiday is creeping up on us. Easter is just around the corner and can be super fun to celebrate with the kiddos. My absolute favourite Easter purchase is plastic Easter eggs. They are so versatile and fun to use with kids, all year round. This article will focus on ways to use these reusable Easter favourites all year long.
First and foremost, you can fill these eggs with chocolate or other treats for the big morning. If you would like to try and limit the sweets in your hunt, you can put lots of non-edible goodies in those eggs as well.
Wearable items: belts, funky shoelaces, clips, nail polish, makeup, rings, bracelets, necklaces, temporary tattoos, beads, lanyard, bandanas.
Toys: toy cars, Lego people, Lego pieces, marbles, stickers, Play-Doh, silly putty, balloons, bouncy balls.
Arts and crafts: wax crayons, glitter, pompoms, buttons, pipe cleaners, confetti, stamps, pencil grips, funky erasers.

Edible (non candy) for the tiny hunters: Goldfish, raisins, Cheerios, marshmallows, yogurt-covered raisins, grapes, blueberries.
Now when the chocolate and treats are all eaten up and the toys put away; those eggs are still perfectly usable. Here are loads of great ways to use them throughout the year with various different activities.
Easter Egg musical instruments: Fill the eggs with beans, beads, rice or macaroni. Glue gun it closed so that no little pieces fall through. Then let the kiddos shake. Note: it’s really fun to fill the eggs with different things to create different sounds and have the kids guess what you’ve used. You can also vary the amount you put in each egg for different sounds as well.
Easter egg sensory bin: Fill a sensory bin (I usually use a new cat litter box) with Easter grass, little bunnies or chicks (you can purchase little erasers for this) or other characters and Easter eggs. Kiddos can enjoy hiding and seeking with Easter eggs.
Pretend play: All you need is a basket, some Easter eggs and bunny ears. Play Easter bunny.
Easter egg fine motor fun: For little ones just learning to use their fingers, have them explore with pompoms and Easter eggs and tongs. They can match the same colour or pompoms and Easter eggs, using the tongs to move the pompoms.
Fill an Easter egg with candy (Jelly Beans, Skittles, Jujubes) and give them to your child. Have them graph how many of each candy they have in their Easter egg. Math fun.
Easter egg words: Write beginning sounds (ca, ma, ta, sa, lit) and ending sounds (ke, t, ll, id) on Easter egg halves. Your child can be challenged to make as many words as possible with the Easter egg halves. Leave some blank so that they can make words up as they come up with them.
Easter egg carton matching: Save your empty egg cartons. Number 12 eggs and write 1-12 on the inside of the egg carton, match them up. You can also do one to one correspondence with this, for older preschoolers you can add dots to represent the number so that they can match the dots to the numbers in the egg carton.
Easter egg matching: There are thousands of matching games you can make with easter eggs. You can draw shapes on the top and bottom and have kids put the match back together. (Other ideas: letters, upper case and lower case letters, numbers, colours, words)
There are hundreds of more ideas out there if you are looking for more ideas. I hope some of these can come in handy after the holiday for you to reuse those easter eggs. Enjoy the holiday with your family. We are having an Easter-themed story time on March 31, come out to the Shawville-Clarendon library and join us, 10:30-11:15.
Save the Date – Look for more information from us soon, we are bringing Junkyard Symphony to Shawville on April 28.