Games with Easter Eggs

Easter is right around the corner! When I was at Target this week, I picked up a bag of plastic eggs for $1.99.  I found THIS SITE on Pinterest (where else, right?) and decided to make a matching game for Collette. She loves Easter eggs :)

My first step was to search clip art online for pictures of her favorite characters (the website suggests doing a "theme" based on what letter of the alphabet you are working on learning, but we aren't quite at that stage yet). Here are Collette's favorite characters (somehow when I made the collage it cut off the bottoms of my characters, but in actuality the pictures show the entire character, feet and all):

I actually made 10 characters, not 9, but if you want to store them in an actual egg crate you will need either 6 or 9 pictures (depending on if you want to use a dozen or dozen and a half egg crate).

Because my little one is hard on paper, I "laminated" mine in packing tape, which was as wide as my pictures, so I just folded the tape around them and trimmed them up. Then I cut each picture in half and put half in each egg:

Collette had a great time opening an egg, identifying the character, and looking for the match. 

I put both halves of the picture in the same colored egg, and Collette guessed correctly where the other half was on her first try (my pack of eggs came with only 8 different colors, so that could complicate things if you choose to do more characters than egg colors). She loves talking about colors, so it was fun for her to identify the color of the egg and the character inside. I may mix up the colors as she gets more practiced. If you have an older kid, playing "Memory" would be fun, too. For Collette, half the fun is opening and closing the eggs.  She likes to try to "crack" them on the table like we crack real eggs.

It took about 10 minutes to make, and Collette has already played with it several times. Last night and this morning she climbed up on a stool to play with her eggs at the island while I made meals-- you can't beat that!

There are lots of other game ideas on that website, too.  I may make another one soon!