How To Dye Eggs with Young Kids….and Keep Everyone Happy

How to dye eggs with kids

It’s Easter time and every year we dye eggs.  I like to adjust HOW we dye eggs to meet the range of ages in my home daycare. The children need the opportunity to learn and experiment at their developmental level.  Plus, I don’t want anyone’s fingers permanently purple at the end of the activity.  Which is highly probable when you have a mix of toddlers, preschoolers and school age children.

Hard boiled Eggs and Blown Eggs

I hard-boiled a bunch of eggs (plus extra for our lunch) for the toddlers to dye. The school age children are old enough to carefully handle the eggs and try blowing them empty.  We set up an Easter Egg Tree where we hang the blown eggs that have been dyed.  Check out my post Easter Nature Table for this technique.

Easter Nature Table

Natural Dye and Food Colouring Dye

The older children and I discussed different plants and foods that might work to dye our Easter eggs.  We chose to experiment with two colours.  We used beet juice for red dye and cumin for a light yellow dye.  The food colouring dye was used for green and blue.  The children decided to observe the differences in the dyeing process between the natural food dyes and the artificial dyes.  Here’s a link to natural food dyes if you want more information.

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I set up the table ahead of time and got everyone into their paint smocks.  The hard-boiled eggs were ready and so were the blown eggs (it’s easier to attach strings onto the blown eggs before you dye them).

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Decorating Techniques

The toddlers and preschoolers each received a hard boiled egg and some crayons. They decorated the eggs with a variety of colours (the crayon wax will show through the dyeing process and create a nice finished effect).

The school age children also used crayons as well as tape to form designs on their eggs. They cut and ripped strips of masking tape and stuck the tape onto their eggs.  We read about this technique on Pinterest. Here is the link back to the original website Indie Fixx.

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Dyeing the Eggs

The toddlers were ready to dye their eggs and had a chance to choose their colour and with assistance put their eggs into bowls of dye.  As they waited for the dye to set, they had a chance to use small tongs and pick up pom poms (pretend eggs).

The preschoolers and school age children used the egg tongs to dye their eggs in the different dyes.  We watched how the natural dyes took longer for the colour to set and noticed that the colour wasn’t as bright. The cumin produced a pale yellow brown colour that the children didn’t like.

Turmeric would have made a brighter yellow, but we didn’t have any, so we mixed up a batch of food colouring yellow.  The red beet juice worked well to produce a pale pink colour.

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The toddler’s attention span ran out first and they went off to play.  Then the preschoolers finished their eggs and let them sit to dry.  The school age children were eager to keep experimenting with mixing different colours.  They enjoyed peeling off the tape to reveal the white area underneath.  Predictions and ideas were discussed on how to dye the white areas different colours without affecting the rest of the egg.

Lunch Time

We had a bunch of beets to now eat up and a hungry crew.  Unfortunately, none of my children will eat beets.  Neither will I, I hate beets!  So I blended them up into a puree and added them into my pancake recipe.

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They turn the pancakes pink but you can’t taste the beets. Here’s the standard recipe I use and then I add 1/4 cup of pureed beets and reduce the milk by 1/4 cup.  I froze the extra beet puree for another day.

We dined on pink pancakes, fruit and hard-boiled eggs (regular not dyed) for lunch as we admired our beautiful Easter Eggs.

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May your Easter Dyeing activities be full of Egg-citing fun!