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Easter has come and gone and after a wonderful celebration with family and friends, I am left storing my baby chicks and tucking away my Easter books until next year. But what about those stupid plastic eggs?
As far as I know, you can't recycle them with your empty milk jugs and diaper boxes. They're so cheap that it seems like a pain to store them when I can just buy 50 more for two bucks next year. I always feel so guilty about things like that, though! What's a mom to do when the party's over and there are a hundred egg halves kicking around underfoot, cluttering and cracking and irritating me to no end?
Well, you turn to one of my favorite blogs with the brightest ideas for all things parenting and fun. You may remember Modern Parents, Messy Kids from my Easter garland debacle, and the site is full of more beautiful and brilliant ideas like that. When I went MPMK on Monday, to my delight, I found yet another way to entertain and educate my kids, but this time, with an upcycling twist: 20 Activities for Plastic Easter Eggs! And considering the fact that I feel like I have three thousand eggs at my disposal, I bet I could get through all twenty, no problem.
Well, here is my favorite idea which led to one wildly successful morning activity with Jax. Upcycling (reusing my eggs for something even cooler) my plastic eggs into an alphabet game! If you know Jax, you know that this sounded like heaven to him.
Materials:
plastic eggs
alphabet stickers, upper and lower case
Directions:
Take 26 plastic eggs and break them apart. Put an upper case letter on the top half, and its corresponding lower case letter on the bottom half.
Break them up, scatter them on the ground, and have your preschooler match them up!
Instant educational fun!
Things To Consider:
How old is your preschooler? How confident are they in matching games? How large is his or her attention span? Jax loves letters, but doesn't necessarily have the patience to dig through 52 egg halves for the upper case L. I was glad I decided to keep my upper and lower case letters the same color, so that if he had a yellow "G," he could scan the other yellows for the lower case "g." If he had to look through all the colors every time, he would have gotten frustrated too quickly.
Also, make sure your egg's lower case letter is facing up when the egg is connected. That way it's more clear to your kid that these two letters go together, big and small.
As you can see, I didn't have all the letters of the alphabet (I bought a new package and they miraculously disappeared) so I used what I had and wrote the rest in with Sharpie. The Sharpie actually wiped off surprisingly easily, so be sure the ink is dry before you let your kids' grubby little hands get all over them. Jax erased both the "z" and the "D." He would hold the "z" in his hands and bring it close to his face and say, "Z, you're my favorite." He hasn't let the little "z" out of his sight since this morning. He even said it goodnight to it before nap.
Here's to reusing something you would normally throw away in a new way! Even if you only use these once, it will be worth the ten minutes it took you to create this activity. I'm going to store them away and have them be a go-to game on a rainy or sick day, or when I'm just out of ideas. I do love having a little something colorful and cool in my back pocket!
Please join me at "Rub Some Dirt On It" for more clever and creative crafts!
