Another holiday week was upon us for Tot School, and this time, we celebrated Easter all week long with fun books, activities and crafts! On Day 1 of Easter week, we read our own Easter Touch and Feel book as well as It's Not Easy Being a Bunny.
Our first activity was sorting pom poms into the corresponding colored eggs (found here). This was the first time I had taken out the Easter eggs for the season, so he was really into opening and closing them and figuring them all out. Nolan enjoyed popping the eggs open and placing them into the Bunny tray, and then happily sorted the pom poms by color for a few rounds. Once we finished, he helped me close up all of the eggs (which really, I ended up helping him- he couldn't close the smaller, cheaper plastic eggs, but had no problem with larger, more durable ones later in the week).
I brought out the Easter sensory bin with plastic eggs, some small Easter knick-knack decorations, and basket grass. We played with this for a really long time, and Nolan loved finding all of the hidden small pieces buried throughout the grass. He liked picking each piece of grass off one by one through his fingers, working on those fine motor skills!
For our game of the day, we practiced spelling Nolan's name with fun Easter egg cutouts, as I hid them around the living room (Pinterest inspired from this source). For each egg that he found, he was to bring it back, tell me the letter and place it on it's corresponding spot on his name. He did great and loved this game a ton! So much, all the pictures I could get were basically a blur since he was running around like a maniac having a blast!
Day 2 of Easter week, we read The Easter Ribbit, and played another fun Egg Hunt game that helped with Nolan's letter identification. I hid all 26 eggs with dot stickers of each letter around the house, and as he found each one, he identified the letter, grabbed an egg ornament and placed it on the ABC printable (found here). He absolutely loves these types of hide and seek games, so we're thriving on them right now! He runs around so quickly it's hard to snap pictures, but I'm so glad he's enjoying himself while learning, too!
After we finished all 26 letters, he helped me take off the stickers on each one and hand them to me to put away. We're getting much better at learning that we need to clean up after every activity we do!
For our arts/craft project of the day, we made Roly-Poly Easter Eggs, which we found on Pinterest, here. This was a fun activity that mixed it up a bit from our traditional painting/handprint/fingerprint/paintbrush painting, so Nolan was excited to get to do something a little different. Nolan dipped plastic eggs in his choice of paint colors, placed them in the box, and simply shook it around to mix the paint all over the paper egg cutout I had taped inside. He thought it was fun and hilarious to shake, shake, shake, and the end project came out much better than I expected!
Finally, I had him help clean off all of the dirty painted plastic eggs by using a water sensory bin and a little soap and let him free play! I thought he would be more into scrubbing the eggs clean with the bottle brush I provided, but he really just wanted to mix up the water and fill, empty and pour the eggs with water. This kept him super interested and busy for a good 15 minutes. We finished by making sure each egg was "all clean!" and letting them air dry on a towel.
Our final Easter Tot School Day consisted of reading Chester's Colorful Easter Eggs, which was a super cute book and very interactive for Nolan to be able to identify lots of colors of eggs on each page, which correlated perfect to our Egg Dying activity for the day. I also introduced lacing cards (found here) for the first time to Nolan, and wasn't sure if he would be able to manipulate them well or not. He did better than I thought and somewhat understood the concept, but I had to hold the cards for him and show him exactly where to lace through each hole. This will definitely be an activity we will continue to work on through the year!
Nolan had been extremely excited to dye eggs throughout the entire week- when we bought the kit, he was very interested and asked for "Egg Dye" every day until we did this. I tried to match up the right colors to the corresponding colored cups, but I got a few wrong based on the tablet color (they're tricky)! Either way, Nolan liked watching the tablets fizz and dissolve after helping me pour the vinegar in each cup. I let him help me put an egg in each one, and we waited for a bit to see our results. After about 10 minutes, we checked and they still were not even close to being dyed well, so we watched some Easter related apps and YouTube videos on the iPad while we waited. After another 30 minutes, Nolan helped me take out each egg and he "ooohed" and "awwwed" over each color, and they were surprisingly very well dyed and vibrant! He was pretty impatient through the whole dying process, but in the end, was SO proud that these were HIS eggs that he dyed and couldn't wait to show them off to Dad when he got home!!
We had such a fun Easter week with all of our activities!
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