Plastic Egg ideas

With the lead up to Easter loads of places are selling plastic eggs and they are great to use for activities and to craft with here are some of the things that we have done with our eggs. These eggs after Easter usually go into the sale but I feel they can be used all year round. 

Catching eggs in the bath is a great game Little Boo caught certain colours.  Then she enjoyed using the eggs to pour the water from egg to egg. 

There are loads of home made play dough ideas out there and the plastic eggs make such a great container for   it. If you decorate the egg it would look even more personalised! Add a few play dough cutters in the egg box as well to make it more fun.  This is a great idea for children who can not eat chocolate or for those that you want another idea for.

Making these shakers is such an easy idea all you need to do is find various different items around the house and add them to the eggs.  We used rice, beads, buttons, pasta, cut up straws. 

Glow in the dark Easter Egg hunt is such good fun! All we did was add some glow sticks into the eggs. 

Add letters or numbers into the eggs and attempt to find the right one. Little Boo started to use the eggs with the Play dough then we decided to use them as molds to make our own Play dough eggs.

Little Boo loves Humpty Dumpty so we decided to make Humpty Dumpty and Mrs Humpty Dumpty.  You can still open these so they would be great to store some little Easter treats!

We used the plastic eggs as molds to make our salt dough eggs.  We cooked these using the microwave and our three minute salt dough recipe.  That meant they were ready really quick so we could paint them :)  

This last idea is the one that Little Boo enjoyed the most! Using the eggs to make nests for the chicks and making our own Easter trays. 

I hope that these ideas come in helpful in the lead up to Easter and after! 

Sharing a book - A squash and a squeeze

Julia Donaldson in my opinion is a wonderful author.  There are so many of her books in our library.  A Squash and a Squeeze is based around a lady who is not happy with her house being too small a wise man then tells her to take in animals then she realises that she was happier with what she used to have .  I feel that the moral of it is to be happy with what you have, kind of like the "grass is greener on the other side" but obviously it is not. 

The book incorporates elements of number recognition up to five so can be effectively used for learning numbers in a fun way.  Interesting to find out was that this was Julia Donaldson's first published picture book in 1993.  Goodreads have given the book 4 and a lot of people have commented on how the book has a good use of rhythm.  When considering the text there are many different size words "tiny for two" "titchy for three" this could make for interesting discussion.

When it came to sharing the story together I thought of some activities related to squashing and squeezing.  I think it is really important that the books can also become a sensory experience and will endeavour to do this more often. I decided  to make sensory balloons (this is something that I have wanted to do for ages) it worked really well.  This would be a great activity for siblings to make the balloons for each other.

This is how to fill the balloon as it took me ages to realise!

Items used to make the sensory balloons

 The items that we used for the balloons were

• Water
• Sequins
• rice (had some that I had dyed)
• gravy granules (make a good crunch noise)
• spiral pasta
• ready brek
• Rice Krispies (again crunchy)
• raisins
• flour
• Golden syrup (My favourite)

I put little face on them with permanent marker to make them more interesting.  All this was done whilst Little Boo was at Nannies with her Daddy that way when she came back it was a complete surprise and she was intrigued what was in them.

Crunch, crunch!

"This one does not crunch Mommy"

Some squashing and squeezing of the balloons.  Then Little Boo said "I want to look  inside, get my scissors Mommy" so we did.

Cutting open the balloon

squeeze to get it all out.

The squashing and squeezing was a great hit! I then wanted to make an activity in which Little Boo could use a sequencing activity having looked at this story stick and realising I had no painting sticks, I had a look around and saw a box file, perfect! this can contain all the images and be used to sequence the images as I put Velcro strip inside.  It was decorated using one of Little Boos contact pictures

Inside the folder Little Boo could stick the images on the Velcro in order.Then peeled them off in the order they left the house

 We have loads of items that we are going to use including our alphabet, numbers, images that are different sizes and colour sorting.  Hope that you have enjoyed this review I wanted to do something a bit "out the box"! 

Making story sacks Handas Hens

After going to my local toy library I was fortunate enough to look at a story sack and little Boo loved them. Unfortunately they are quite expensive so I decided to make our own. I used a pillow case as the sack as many online bags are expensive and I had some spare . I then managed to find some t-shirt transfers from the local pound land so could put the image of the story on the front.

Recently, I made a story sack on Handa's Hens this is a wonderful story which incorporates a lot of counting it is also nice as the images are really colourful and appealing. I really enjoyed making this for little Boo as it made me think about what was appropriate to include.

A lot of the contents were printed resources from twinkl this is a great place to get resources and is cheap for a years subscription.

As it is close to easter it was easy to come by the plastic eggs and chicks for the end of the story. I have decided the next ones are going to be going on a bear hunt, Handas Surprise and The very Hungary Caterpillar.