Decorating Easter Eggs with your Toddler!

This weekend we decorated Our Simple Easter Eggs and it doesn’t always have to be stressful, especially with babies and toddlers! A few simple materials and letting the children make their own marks is very effective. It was super cheap and I just used some kitchen items I had to hand. This could be a very quick and simple option to decorating Easter eggs or you could really get quite sometime out of it if your little ones love painting and mark making like we do. We extended onto painting pictures and really filled in some time which ended in a kitchen sink bath!

I chose to use a pack of 20 polystyrene Eggs with lots of different sizes in. This meant that not only could we get creative we were using our math skills as well. I popped an old towel down on the floor and the pastel paints into a reusable plastic lollipop maker with some different styled paint brushes. I put all of the materials on a baking tray so she could choose from them herself then used an empty tray to put the finished eggs on to dry. She selected the eggs to paint and as she is showing an interest in identifying the size of the things she held it to show me and said “It’s a little egg” I was able to encourage her to use more language like this as she painted by saying “I’m going to paint this big egg, this small egg is rolling” etc while showing her the different sizes to help her understanding. It’s really easy to bring in lots of different areas of learning with such simple activities. Learning through play is so beneficial in the early years.

She used lots of fine motor skills when using the paints and tools. Dabbing and brushing the eggs before she swirled around the brush on her hands and squeezed the brushes in her whole hand and rolling the eggs in her palms. Once the eggs were all a lovely mix of colours we left them to dry over night before I displayed them in a plastic Easter bucket with some shredded paper and a little fluffy chick. She loved finding them in her bucket the next day and has since enjoyed emptying them in and out lots of  times.

When she had finished with the eggs and began painting her hands I grabbed some card and let her decorate them as well and now we also have Homemade Easter cards too! Two birds with one very messy stone! We also visited her cousins house this weekend when they were making their eggs so we had a go at decorating a real egg! This time we used a hard boiled egg and some pens to draw on it and then some pva and glitter! The only problem we had with using a real egg was that when she dropped it it smashed and become smelly. Polystyrene is light and means the littler ones can drop or throw them and they can still make it to the competition in one piece.

Head over to my Little Learners facebook page and share your Simple Easter Eggs and or other Easter Creations on my visitor posts! I would love to see them!