a handful of easter egg activities

We will be starting some Easter activities in my house in the coming week.  I like to celebrate Easter as a new beginning and a time of seasonal change (we are moving from wet to dry season here).  This year I’ve been thinking a lot about eggs, and these are some “eggtivities” (that gets the corny egg word out of the way) that I hope to play with my sons this year …
We are going to make a nest using these instructions from Growing Up Creative and in it we will display our

• dyed eggs.  Simply Modern Mom has a good post about dying and decorating eggs.  And if you want to investigate natural dying this post from Simple Kids has instructions.

• felted eggs (hopefully).  I got the idea from this post at Childhood Magic, which has a link to the instructions.  We gave it a try this week, but when I cut the eggs open they were not felted inside, so back to the drawing board …
• plastic (or felted eggs if I can get them to work) with oviparous animals inside.  What are oviparous animals?  Animals that lay eggs.  Examples are birds, crocodiles, dinosaurs, turtles, snakes and the platypus and echidna. 

We might also try some

• egg experiments – Eggs can be used in many great science experiments.  Free Kids Crafts has instructions for egg etching, determining if an egg is cooked or raw, testing the strength of eggshells and the egg in a bottle.  And to these I would add squeezing an egg from Steve Spangler Science (it would be good to do this before the experiment on testing the strength of eggshells).

And play some

• egg games.  Of course there is the traditional Easter egg hunt, but it is a little hot here still to manage much of a hunt without the eggs melting.  In the past I have just thrown them on the lawn and had an egg scramble, but I might try the people egg hunt (eggs are hidden on people – in the pocket, behind the ear - for others to find)from Balancing Beauty and Bedlam this year (there are also a couple of other hunt ideas there). 

Last Easter, I was thinking about family traditions including cascarones, creating personalised chocolate eggs and Easter story cookies and you can find that post here.