Letter Recognition Games Using Easter Eggs

We’re all about our ABCs in this house lately! At 4 years old, my little girl is learning to read and sound out words. Our little man just turned two and while watching his sister, he has also fallen in love with letters too! I’m constantly amazed at how excited he is to play letter recognition games at such a young age. Combine that with seasonal Easter crafts for kids and we’re having fun all day long!

Letter Recognition Games

I love open-ended games and that’s exactly what this fun So when Walmart asked me to check out this innovative, new product – plastic eggs, perfect for Easter – I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them!

Easter Crafts for Kids

Paper Magic now sells PLASTIC eggs, in a 12 count carton, that can be dyed and decorated just like regular Easter eggs using your favorite egg dye kits. The eggs feel wooden, actually, but are light and hallow. You don’t waste money on food, there’s no risk of breaking, spoiling, smelling, and no need to boil eggs for an Easter hunt. Honestly, all those factors were my least favorite part of the whole Easter egg tradition. The whole carton is only $1.97 in Walmart stores.

The instructions on the package says to use only vinegar, which we did, but I found the tips from this post on how to dye plastic eggs very helpful too. For our educational Easter craft, we bought two plastic egg cartons, a regular dye kit, some cute tongs and coloring cups for good measure. We also bought Color Snap to write our letters on the eggs (not pictured in this post, but they look like q-tips!).

Easter Crafts for Kids: Making Letter Eggs

We dyed our plastic eggs much like you do with regular eggs, expect I used 100% vinegar. I bought these small tongs because they were cute, but they turned out to be very useful. Since the eggs are hallow, they actually floated in the dye solution. The tongs were the perfect size for Alina’s little hands and helped to keep the eggs submerged.

All in all, I loved the plastic eggs. They look so real and have been utterly indestructible. The end result was a very light pastel color, which was fine for us. After they dried, I let the kids color them and add the stickers that came in the egg dye kit. Using the Color Snap product, I helped Alina write letters on each egg. We had 24 eggs, so two eggs had two letters on them. The kids didn’t seem to mind though.

Letter Recognition Games with Plastic Easter Eggs

We’re having lots of fun with our Easter craft. The egg carton is perfect as a letter holder and to build words with. We build word families by looking for eggs that would make a new word to the O and G eggs, etc.

We sound out each letter as we put it in the carton, visually building a word, instead of just using auditory ques. I asked Alina to draw a picture of a something that started with that letter on the reserve side of the egg (before I took these pictures!)

For Easter, I plan to hide the eggs and ask the preschoolers to find specific letters. The big kids find the eggs way too fast, so hopefully looking for specific ones will slow them down a bit! And since we’ll be in California with their cousins on Easter, I can bring the letter eggs with us!

Sebastian plays letter recognition games with the eggs, too! His play is more tactile though, as he loves holding them in his hands and dumping them onto his floor. He dumps out the carton, piles them up and kicks them around – all while I pull one from the stack and ask which letter it is. I am shocked at how many letters he already knows at barely two years old! Big sister has been an awesome teacher for this little guy!

For less than 2 bucks at Walmart, these plastic eggs are a great buy. There are so many cool Easter crafts you can make out of them! And because you can skip the boiling and disposal of real eggs, these will be my go-to Easter eggs from now on.