Easter Egg Fun for Babies and Toddlers

It was a week before Easter, and I made up a small chant, based on one of my son’s favourite books We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, “We’re going on an egg hunt! We’re going to find a lot of eggs…” But is Budster familiar with eggs? No, when I think back, his experience with eggs was pretty limited. Once, he opened the fridge and dropped a carton of eggs on the floor by accident, but that’s about it. So, in anticipation of Easter, we hurried to have some fun with eggs!

Eggs and Moon Sand

First, we played with eggs and homemade moon sand. Budster is good at inventing his own games, and it is gratifying to offer him materials to work with and see what he can come up with. That time he had sand, three cups and three plastic eggs. I put white beans in the first egg, rice in the second egg, and a seashell in the third one.

Budster soon discovered how to open eggs and added their insides to his sand box. He made some domes with half eggs. and he was very curious what can be put inside of the egg halves. Maybe some rocks? Or seashells? That gave me an idea.

Egg Rattles

The next day Budster and I sat at the table with two eggs and a box. The eggs were empty this time, but the box was full of small treasures: buttons, beans, pompoms, lentils, pasta, etc. I made the box a while back, hoping that it would be useful in playing with colours in the future, and I tried to match colours of the cells with objects inside them. The purple and green cells were the most difficult to fill.

I thought we would put small things inside the eggs and listen to how differently they sound. But before we got to that part, Budster took time exploring and admiring his treasures. I could tell that he was excited about having so many small things to play with. After all, he is the guy who goes to a toy store and picks up a small broken wheel in the corner.

The lentils captivated his attention, and I gave him a spoon to pour them from one cell to another. Each cell should have some lentils, and Budster took care of that.

Finally he noticed the eggs and added lentils into one half as well. That made our first rattle. The second one got a pompom in it. Now was the time to shake and compare.

After watching me close and open eggs once, Budster decided he would do it himself. So he spent some time, taking two egg-halves apart and putting them back together. First he matched colours, then he held an experiment on whether two halves of different colours could be put together. It was a success!

Later, Budster returned to the table with some play-dough. It was entirely his idea, and it worked out well. We moulded a couple of pies with egg halves and lavishly decorated them.

Painting Egg Shapes

In a meanwhile, we also painted eggs. They had to be paper eggs this year. We painted a cut-out egg shape with watercolours.

Scratching Egg Designs

We also tackled a more complicated project, which we did in two parts. For the first part, we took out wax crayons (we have a box of Stockmar Wax Crayons) and covered a sheet of paper with all the colours of the rainbow. I have also read that you do not have to use wax crayons for the first layer – you can use pencils or paints, then a layer of candle wax.

Then, I painted one colourful background with white acrylic paint and another with black. Older children can do this part themselves, but Budster’s strokes are not even enough for this project.

I left the sheets to dry for several hours before cutting egg shapes out of them. Finally, they were ready, so I dug out some scraping tools – a couple of sculpting tools I use for working with clay. They are not sharp, but have pointy ends. A mechanical pencil, fountain pen or anything hard and pointy would do as well.

I showed Budster how to scrape the paint, revealing rainbow colours underneath. He made a few lines, but then he discovered that by tapping his tool he can make small colourful dots, and that was how he decorated his egg. Then we tried black eggs, and I made one, while Budster worked on the other.

Making Easter Cards

We also prepared Easter cards. First, Budster made a painting with Gouache paints in his bold expressive style, then I cut an egg shape in a piece of card-stock, folded it in two, and inserted his painting inside. We got a coloured Easter egg!

Now we are ready for an Easter hunt! Do you want to have a look at Budster’s gifts before they are packed? He is getting a wonderful book about birds and a set of bird figurines (Safari Backyard Birds Toob) – the birds will naturally hide inside the eggs we will put around the yard. What are you putting inside of your eggs this year?

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