plastic eggs Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Letter Mats

March 23, 2018 By Deirdre

Plastic eggs are fun to find during egg hunts or in a basket on Easter morning. They are also great to use when you are learning letters. You can use learning letters printable mats and a set of twelve plastic eggs to work on the letters of the alphabet.

Before your children start their letter work, you can have them find the eggs around your classroom or a room of your house. If you think this would be chaotic, you can have the egg sections sitting in a basket or bucket ready for your children to use.

If you choose to have an egg hunt, you may want to read your children the book We’re Going on an Egg Hunt or Peppa’s Easter Egg Huntto your children. Children who hadn’t had hunt experience will gain background experience on how they work.

Getting Ready for the Learning Letters Activity

You will need to print out the Learning Letters with Plastic Eggs and Letter Mats. They were designed to be printed out on a color printer. If you choose to print them out on a black and white printer, they chick and egg will be shades of gray.

You will also need about six plastic eggs per child. Your children will use the tops and bottom of the eggs to build the letters of the alphabet. At the end of this post, you will find some cool plastic eggs that can be used for this activity.

Learning Letters with Plastic Egg Activity

You can give your children one letter mat to work on at a time or you can give them a stack of the mats. If you give them a stack of the mats, they can go through them and pick the letter they want to work on.

Once each child has a letter mat, invite them to place a plastic egg half on each of the circles on their mat. When they have all their egg sections in place, have them tell you what letter they built. Then they can work on another letter mat.

If you like this learning letters activity, here are some more you will love:

Click Clack Alphabet Letter Learning Laptop Activity

Alphabet Cup Hunt

Alphabet Letter Match with a Spider Theme

Letter Pizza

Cookie-Themed Alphabet Activity

Clapping and Stomping Alphabet Activities

Seed Germination – Will the Color of the Egg Affect Seed Growth?

March 19, 2018 By Deirdre

We have only had the bean seeds planted in the translucent plastic Easter eggs for a short time. If you decided to try this seed germination STEM activity, you will be conducting it at the same time we are.

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You may want to read the gardening books that inspired this activity to your kids before you start it. We looked over the collection books found in the Lois Ehlert’s Growing Garden Gift Set. It includes the booksPlanting a Rainbow, Eating the Alphabet, andGrowing Vegetable Soup

Getting Ready for the Seed Germination Activity

You will need to purchase a set of transparent plastic Easter eggs to plant small lima bean seeds into. You will also need potting soil and an old egg carton for this project.

Starting the Seed Germination Activity

Your children will need to place potting soil into one end of each plastic egg. They can decide if they want to put soil in the top or the bottom section of the egg.

Then they will place the end of the egg with the soil in it into the egg carton open side up.

Next, they will place a small lima bean seed into the soil in each of the eggs.

Then children will need to lightly water the soil and seed.

Finally, they will place the end of each egg that doesn’t have soil in it on top of the side that does. This will create seed germination greenhouses for the seed to grow in.

You will want to place the egg carton holding the tiny greenhouses in a warm sunny spot.

STEM Learning

Your children will have fun journaling about how each of the seeds is growing in a spiral notebook or gardening journal.

They can note how each of the seeds is doing in its greenhouse.
Children can predict what color of egg house will get the most sunlight.
They can note if certain colored egg greenhouses are housing seeds that are growing better than others.
Children can create a hypothesis of what made each of the plant’s growth the same or different.

If you like this gardening idea, here are some more STEM gardening activities, we have done.

Hydroponic Gardening in a Plastic Bottle

Creating a Paper Plate Greenhouse

Growing Pumpkin Seeds in a Pumpkin

Creating a Spider Web Gardening Trellis

This post is part of the Storybook Science Series hosted by Inspiration Laboratories.

Plastic Egg Activities – Muffin Tin and Egg Number Match

April 3, 2017 By Deirdre

If you are looking for something to do with all those plastic eggs, you can use a few of them to create these plastic egg activities. It was designed to be played by young children, but you will probably come up with fun ways to play this game with older children.

How to Put the Plastic Egg Activities Together

Counting Numbers

You will need to print out the Chick and Egg Muffin Tin Counting Numbers. They should fit into a standard twelve cup muffin tin.

Plastic Eggs with Number Dots

Then you will need to get the plastic eggs ready. You will only use the large top section from a plastic egg for the Easter egg game. You can use the bottom section of the eggs to make plastic egg parachutes.

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The dots will need to hole punched out of the felt to placed on the plastic eggs. You may need a strong hole punch like the Power Punch to cut through thick pieces of felt.

There will need to be dots placed on each of the ten eggs. The first egg top will have one dot glued onto it. You will glue ten dots onto the last egg top.

You may be thinking why not just draw the dots on the egg tops with a marker. I thought children would like being able to touch each dot as they counted them on each section. The felt dots will also add texture and a raised surface for kids to touch while counting.

How to Play the Plastic Egg Activities

There are a number of different ways that your children can play this game. It will be up to you to decide if you want to play one of the versions I came up with or one of your own.

Game Ideas:

You can have you or your children pick a number. Then you can have your children cover the chick and number circle in the muffin tin with egg section with that number of dots on it.
Children can cover the numbers in order from one to 10 with the egg sections that displays that number.
You can stack the egg sections in an unnumbered muffin section or sections. They can work through the stack or stacks by placing egg tops on the correct number.

This activity was created to go along with book Peep and Egg: I’m Not Hatching by Laura Gehl. Here are some more chick and egg activities”

Science Experiments with Egg Parachutes

March 14, 2016 By Deirdre

Over Christmas vacation, my family visited the children’s museum in Columbia, South Carolina. One of our favorite areas featured science experiments with plastic eggs. Kids were encouraged to create eggs with parachutes that would float up in air tubes or tunnels and out the opening in the top. Recently we did some STEM science experiments with egg parachutes at home.

We don’t happen to have air tunnels at our house. Once we had created a variety of egg parachutes, we took them outside and tossed each of them in the air. Some of the parachutes were attached to a plastic egg with wooden objects and some with different types of straws. Some had short side attachments and the others were long. The goal was to make each one float back to the ground with its parachute catching air. We didn’t want the egg just to fall back to earth and crash. We didn’t know if the length of the item attached to the egg and parachute would make a difference. That was something we explored.

Here are the supplies for the science experiments:

Plastic egg halves
Large plastic straws
Narrow bendy straws
Popsicle sticks
Wooden ice cream spoons
Wood chopsticks
Coffee filters
Masking tape

Putting the Egg Parachutes Together

After deciding which connectors to use, we started building. The two matching connectors were taped inside each of the plastic egg halves. We added tape that crossed from the inside of the egg to the outside around each connector to make sure it stayed in place. Then a ring of the tape was added to the outside of each of the eggs to hold the outside edges of the crisscrosses in place.

Then we taped the connectors to the outside of a coffee filter. To add another variable we could have taped connector to the inside of the coffee filter. We have to try more science experiments using that idea on another day.

Conducting Science Experiments

We used underhand throw to toss each of the egg parachutes into the air. JDaniel added a big swing to his toss. The parachute with large straws caught a lot of air.

It had a unique sideways descent. That made it easy to chase down and catch.

The egg parachute with the popsicle traveled high in the air when I threw it. JDaniel actually took this picture of the egg parachute descending.

I think your children will have fun conducting science experiments with plastic Easter eggs. After they have attended an egg hunt, you will have plenty of eggs to conduct experiments with.

Here are some other fun ways to use plastic eggs in learning:

Plastic Egg Greenhouse

Building Background

Here are some wonderful books about parachutes.
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Easter Game- Egg Toss Bottles

March 14, 2014 By Deirdre

This is a sponsored post.

JDaniel and I had the opportunity to go to JoAnn’s Fabrics and Crafts to hunt for treasures. We searched up and down every aisle and found way too many amazing things. I was just looking for the material needed to make an Easter Game with Egg Toss Bottles . JDaniel wanted to see what they had beyond my supply list. He loved the giant foam mattresses that seemed to reach the ceiling. The holiday related supplies also called to him. It was just as hard for me to focus on my supply list.

We eventually ended up looking through the array of washi tape to find designs that looked like Easter. It took quite a while to decide with designs. There were so many great choices. Deciding on what colors were really the most Easter like really helped.

The next item on my list was plastic Easter eggs. I thought it would be really easy to decide which ones to take home. JDaniel loved the giant eggs, but it was decided that they wouldn’t fit inside the plastic juice bottles that we were going to use to catch the eggs. Maybe the Easter bunny will have to sneak back to JoAnn’s and get him one of those.

It was hard to leave our time of window shopping, but beautiful warm sun was calling to JDaniel to come play in it. I was excited about heading home to put together the egg toss catchers.

While JDaniel played in our backyard, I sat in a folding chair and removed the bottom area of both juice bottles. When that was done, I started wrapping the washi tape around the juice bottles. The bottles were a little challenging to wrap. They had a lot of ridges and curves. I have never crafted with washi tape before and was surprised by how easy it was to pull up and move on the bottle when it looked a little wonky (not straight) to me. It is now my favorite kind of tape!

When the egg toss catchers were done, I asked JDaniel to play catch with me. It turns out that I am not very good at catching eggs being tossed at me. Thank goodness we used plastic eggs.

If you would like to find the washi tape or tie dyed eggs we used for this Easter game or egg toss activity or craft supplies for a wonderful idea of your own , you need to visit JoAnn’s Fabrics and Craft.

Disclaimer: I was sent a gift card to buy the materials to complete this craft ideas.

12 Ways to Learn Using Plastic Easter Eggs

April 2, 2010 By Deirdre

1. You can place a toy in a stack of eggs and search for the one with the prize.

2. You can put a capital letter on one end of an egg and its lower case letter on the other. Break them open, mix them up, and have your child search for the match. I did eggs with matching capital letters for JDaniel.

3. You can put together a set of toys or pictures and have your child put them in the egg that has the beginning letter on it.

4. You can put a number on one end of the egg and a set of corresponding dots on the other end. They can then match the tops and bottoms or place the correct number of objects in the egg.

5. You can mix up the colors of the tops and bottoms then have your child match the colors correctly.

6. You can make maracas with whole grain circular cereal. Just watch that is doesn’t come apart and become a bowl for a snack.

7. You can put objects in the eggs and have the children match the sounds like Activity Mom did this week.