Works for Me Wednesday - Easter!

Hey everyone & HAPPY EASTER! I thought I would quickly share with all of you some Easter activities that I use with my preschoolers that I thought you may want to try at home with your own children. I teach at a Christian preschool, so pretty much anything is fair-game! Have some fun with your little-ones!

1. Easter egg alphabet match - take a Sharpie (or your favorite permanent marker brand of choice!) and write an upper-case letter on one half of a plastic easter egg & the corresponding lower-case letter on the other half. Put all of the egg-halves in an easter basket or bucket and have your kids match them up with the correct letter, identifying it as matches are made. If you decide to mark eggs for all 26 letters of the alphabet, you can put them in ABC order when you are all done! Store them in a basket to play again and again!

2. What's inside the Easter egg? - Using the same Easter eggs that you marked above, search your house for small objects to correspond with each letter. Put the objects inside the eggs, then have your child shake the egg & guess what could be inside. After they've guessed, they can look inside and see if they were correct. When my preschoolers do this activity, once they open the egg, then I will repeat the letter, the letter sound & the name of the object so they can hear the correspondence (c, /c/, cotton ball). Objects that I use (don't let the super-little ones use this game!!): ball, balloon, button, cotton, elephant eraser, frog key chain, gumball, heart, key, money, marble, paper pieces, Polly Pocket, ring, smile sticker, star, tea bag, whistle, white crayon, zebra toy.

3. I do all sorts of Jellybean activities. We read "Too Many Jellybeans" and then do various jellybean activities. I gave each child a bag of jellybeans (this one wasn't for eating) in their Easter baskets, along with a printout of the Jellybean Prayer. We talked about each color and its significance for us as children of God. I then gave each child a second bag of jellybeans to use for our Jellybean Math activities. First the children sorted the jellybeans by color, by placing one into each square of this graph (I colored the bottom so that they would know which color went where). Then, using the corresponding color of crayon, the children colored under each jellybean that he/she placed on the graph. When they finished, they read me the results of their graphs, telling me which had the most, the least & which ones were tied. My kids are awesome at graphing (they're FOUR!!). After that activity, we also did jellybean addition, which also went great! Using this page (which, again, I pre-colored for them since we were short on time), the children again sorted their jellybeans by color. When they were finished sorting, the children were instructed to count how many jellybeans were in each rectangle and write the corresponding number in the box. They were to then "scoot" the jellybeans over to the right-side of each row & again count the total & write the number. This was a little more difficult than the graphing, but they still really enjoyed it...and then I FINALLY let them eat the jellybeans, which they were begging for me to do for pretty much the entire time.

4. Finally, I also wanted to make Empty Tomb cookies with my kids, but there was just no time this year since our last day before Easter break was Monday, which also happened to be St. Patrick's day...

Enjoy & have a Blessed Easter!