Easter Egg Letter Games

Do your kids love to search for Easter eggs? Mine do. We search for eggs on a daily basis as we lead up to Easter. I have a variety of ages in my home daycare so I decided to create some educational egg hunting games that were tailored to each age group.  We have a bunch of plastic eggs that are big enough for our fridge letter magnets to fit inside. You could also use letter tiles from a scrabble game or simply write letters on small pieces of paper.

Our egg hunt had four different ability levels so the children could all hunt for their own eggs at the same time.  Older children helped younger children and they shared in the excitement, learning and fun together. All the kids liked carrying a basket to put their eggs in. Here are the levels we used.

Level One- Practicing colour recognition, counting to three and recognizing the first letter of their name.

These children had to hunt for a certain colour of eggs (each child had a different colour) and then open the egg to find their letter.  They each had three eggs hidden to practice counting and recognizing the number concept of three. Ex; Bill had to find three blue eggs and each egg held a letter B. These eggs were hidden in obvious spots around the room.

Level Two- colour recognition, counting to five and recognizing five letters.

These kids were given five eggs to find in a certain colour. I choose to put letters that we had recently been practicing in the five eggs.  When children are first learning letters it helps to associate a letter with meaningful people in their lives. You could choose the first letter of their name, M for Mommy, D for Daddy and then the first letter in their sibling’s name, pet’s name, or G for Grandma’s name, etc. The children enjoyed finding the eggs in silly places.  Here’s an egg having a nap in the doll house!

Level Three- colour recognition, counting the number of letters in their name and recognizing the letters and correct order of letters in their name.

I gave these children a reference sheet of paper to help them remember the order of letters in their own names.  One child (Tim) decided he wanted to find the eggs in the correct letter order of his name.  Tim searched for his letter T first, when he came across his letter M, he left it in its spot and kept searching for his T.  This would be a real memory challenge if your name was very long!

Level Four- colour recognition, counting and ordinal numbers and reading words.

This child was told to find six eggs.  Each egg had a piece of paper inside with a word written on it. Each piece of paper had an ordinal number in the top corner to indicate where the word should appear in the sentence. Once the words were arranged in the correct order the sentence could be read.

The children all had fun and were challenged at their own egg hunt level.  How do you adjust your Easter egg hunting to meet the age differences at your house?