Easter is right around the corner. April 21st is Easter Sunday which can make for a lot of fun for the early childhood classroom. There are so many great activities that you can do with a tiny easter egg. Who would have thought that you could do so much? Some times it can be quiet difficult on incorporating differently themed activities in centers throughout the classroom though. So we felt that it would be great to explain what you can do throughout the classroom to add the Easter theme to your classroom in a way that will be fun for all. Here is an activity for each center in the classroom.
Just add a basket of easter eggs in the center and allow the children to see how many egg pieces they can stack. You could put a card in the basket that gives them different ideas on what to do whether it be who can stack the most egg pieces or who can build the tallest tower out of eggs or who can roll the egg the farthest without using their hands. There are endless possibilities in the block center. Allow the children to be creative and just explore them.
Dramatic Play Center
This could be a great area to talk about the different season and what you wear in each one. Put four baskets of different types of clothing that you would wear in each season in the dramatic play area. Label the baskets and have the children sort the items into the correct baskets. This is a great way to explain how the seasons have changed and talk about Spring and how we change the type of clothing that we wear because of the temperature changes.
This could be one of my favorite activities. It looks so fun! You will need several items for this one but well worth the fun for not just the children but for the teachers as well. Take a plastic tub that is several inches deep and fill with Easter grass. Then you will need several plastic Easter eggs, magnet sticks, and paper clips or different types of metal to go into the easter eggs. Put the different metal pieces into the eggs and tape them up. Place them in the bottom of the tub then allow the children to use the magnetic sticks to pick up the easter eggs. See how many they can pick up at once.
There are so many different things you can do in this area, but I stress to allow the children to make their own art and not replicate what you have made. This will enable children to be able to express themselves and be able to become creative on their own.
You can take a thin box and put an egg-shaped piece of paper in it with different colors of paint. Put some Easter eggs in the box and allow the children to roll around the box to make the eggs roll and color the piece of paper.
There are several different things that you can do in this center depending on the age and developmental abilities of your class. You may have several different levels and want to do all three. The first one would be to put the lower case and upper case letter on each side of the egg and allow the children to match them. You can also put letters on one side and the other half of the word on the other side and allow children to match the words. Another great activity is to take an egg, cut out and put the letter on one side and then a picture that would begin with that letter on the other, cut them out and laminate and then allow the children to match.
You can put numbers on the eggs and allow the children to count the items that are in the eggs to match the numbers. Or you can do numbers on one side with dots on the other and allow them to match. You could make paper eggs with lines on them to cut different designs of the eggs in half. This is a great fine motor activity for children and lots of fun.
In sensory bins, you can do about anything. This is a great time to put Easter grass, Easter eggs, and many other things in the bin to allow children to explore. Get creative with it and allow children to explore.