Even twenty somethings want an Easter egg hunt!

Goodness knows I've organized my share of Easter egg hunts, for first grade, preschool, and extended family! This year is going to be a little different: an Easter egg hunt for my married twenty something year old sons. What to do?

Hatching my idea

I'll admit, my first thought was that they'd think an egg hunt is lame and refuse to get into it - which is actually what gave me the idea.  There's no way my grown sons would get excited about running around the backyard for mini candy bars and plastic toys (sometimes I miss them being 3). So what WOULD they get excited about?

Important fact #1: My kids are competitive.

Important fact #2: The prizes don't actually have to go in the eggs.

Important fact #3: The only thing lamer than getting $1 in an egg is getting $1 in an egg when your brother / wife / sister-in-law just got $20.

Important fact #4: I have a lot of different kinds of plastic "eggs".

Do you see the possibilities?

The set up

I'm turning this Easter egg hunt into a competition. I have 5 kinds of "egg" so I need 5 categories. In each category I need 4 prizes (for 4 kids). The prizes SHOULD NOT be equal - to get everyone motivated there have to be SOME prizes worth working for and some that you'll catch grief about for the rest of your life. (Good spirited teasing = love around here).  Depending on your family and your kids you may have all kinds of categories, no judgement on what's right for you and yours! Here's what's happening for me and mine:

Candy: large bag of m&ms, full size candy bar, mini candy bar, a single mint candy.

Fruit: pineapple, punnet of strawberries, a banana, a grape

Beverages: bottle of alcohol (remember, no judgement, you do you!), tiny bottle of alcohol, can of soda, can of grapefruit juice.

Money: $20, $10, $5, $1

Gift cards: Starbucks, Target, Walmart, Dollar Store (different small amounts)

I'll have the prizes on a table, sorted by category. 

How to play

Each person is allowed to collect 1 of each kind of egg. They're going to want to bring it to me quickly - because first come, first served. You got an egg for the money category? First person gets the $20. Second one gets the $10, etc. Give me the egg, grab your prize, go find another egg! The faster you are, the better your prizes! Slow poke wins a grape, $1, grapefruit juice, a tiny gift card, and a mint - not a terrible prize, unless your brother got $20, a bottle of booze, a pineapple, bag of candy and $15 Starbucks card!

The twist

Of course there's a twist! There's one more egg, and it's a doozy. After everything else is said and done the person with the golden egg gets to switch prizes in 1 category with ANYONE else!

 The outcome

 I can't wait to see how this plays out! I think - hope - they're going to love it. It would be great if they said something like, "You're the best mom in the world and I love you to the moon and back!" I won't hold my breath on that one, but maybe, just maybe, I'll hear "Thanks mom!" and get a couple of big hugs. THAT'S what I want for Easter. Wish me luck!

Paula

P.S. What other categories popped into your head? LMK - maybe I'll add it to our fun!

Excited for Ee: Top 10 e activities

 

E is exciting and extraordinary, just like our little ones, so I've put together some ideas you can enjoy doing together.

There are LOTS of ways explore eggs, so let's start with them.

1. Use egg shells to make the letter E!  

For this activity I saved and cleaned egg shells, and let them dry.  Then I did something extra special - I let my students use REAL grown up tools - safety goggles and a mallet from my garage - and we smashed those shells to bits!

Oh yes, that was exciting! They felt interesting, but a little sharp and gritty, so we didn't play with them for long...

We carefully poured them out of the box we had smashed them in, into a releasable bag, then added a little food coloring and rubbing alcohol to dye them colors (exact amounts don't matter, just add enough rubbing alcohol to disperse the coloring, then pour them out onto newspaper or an old box to dry).  Later in the day we wrote the letter E on a paper using a LOT of glue, then sprinkled on the egg shells. When it was dry we gently shook off the extra pieces of shell, and had a lovely eggy letter E!

2. Beginning sound sort.

Put tiny toys inside plastic Easter eggs, making sure some have things that begin with E, and some don't.  I was able to include these things: toy elephant, eagle, Elmo, erasers, and a couple were even empty - an unexpected E word!  The children pulled the eggs out of a basket, opened them, and decided if the items started with E or not.  We also repeated this game with 1" letter tiles, and the children sorted the letters into Ee / not Ee.

3.  Make a torn paper Elmo craft.

I don't think I came up with this idea, but one of the challenges of blogging about almost 30 years of teaching, is I no longer know where I found ideas or inspiration, and how much of an activity is my take on something I saw long ago. Until I sat down to write this, I thought I had pinned it from someone else - but when I look for it on my Letter E Pinterest board, it's not there.  

4. Humpty Dumpty's Egg Drop

I DO know where I found this idea! Mrs. Kelly's Kindergarten did this so well, I flat out copied her!  Go ahead and set a couple of eggs to hard boil, and while they're cooking click the link above to check out the details.  You'll be dropping this poor egg off his wall several times!

5.  Field trip to the zoo

Children learn best through experience - it's one thing to tell you an apple is red and round and tastes good, but you don't know apples until you hold one in your hand, take a crunchy bite, and taste it.  It's the same with everything else - your child will learn MORE when they can see, smell, hear, taste and touch things.  Obviously there are plenty of things we can't or shouldn't explore with all our senses, but if you are able to, find ways to let your children experience the world.  

One of our favorites is to visit the zoo.  When I had my preschool I was very fortunate to live near a world class zoo that also offered year long passes at a discount.  Having a pass for the year meant we could go often without paying more, so we did!  One of the harder to recognize benefits of this, is that we never felt compelled to stay all day to "get our money's worth".  Little legs wear out quicker than grown up ones, and if tired kiddos can't stop and nap.... well... that's a whole different experience!

Not everyone has access to a zoo, or the funds for that matter.  Do what you can.  For the letter E, that might mean looking for eagles, visiting someone who has chickens so you can collect the eggs, or stopping to look at an earwig you spot.  It also doesn't have to be this week!  

6.  Easter egg hunt.

Yes, I know, it's currently September, and not even close to Easter.  Yes, I know, not everyone celebrates Easter.  Guess what?  Your children won't mind a bit!  This is us, every September:

I keep empty Easter eggs tucked away, and every year when we learn about the letter E, I get them out.  Here's what I've learned from my students:  It doesn't matter if anything is in the eggs.  The fun of an egg hunt is in the running and searching and gathering and squealing and laughing.  Hiding the eggs is just as much fun as collecting them.  No basket? No problem!  Use an empty plant pot, a bucket from the sandbox, or collect them in your shirt.  

This is a game my students can play over and again for a couple of weeks.  As they do, they're learning: if you want to play the game again, you have to help hide the eggs, it doesn't feel nice to have all the eggs and see your friends feel sad that they have none, it's fun to give a friend hints to help them find some, waiting for the egg hunt to start over is hard but we CAN control ourselves and wait for everyone to be ready, and more! We repeat this whole process again in the spring, in the weeks before our actual Easter egg hunt.

7.  Hand prints - let's get messy!

The elephant hand print is self explanatory:  paint their hand gray and stamp it on paper.  When its dry, they can add details with a black marker.  You can see we added torn tissue paper to suggest grass along the bottom of our page.  I found this idea here.

The link to the original eagle hand print no longer works, but my pin for it does - find it here on my hand print and foot print board.

This one is a little more complex.  As you can see, we printed it on a separate paper, which we glued onto our tissue paper sky.  (Tissue paper doesn't work well to take hand prints.)  This one was completed in 3 steps.  First we made 2 brown hand prints, overlapping slightly on the palms.  Once that was dry, we painted 3 fingers white and pressed those on for the tail feathers.  We also painted the side of our curved pinky fingers, which made the head.  Beak and eyes were added when dry.

8.  Music, of course!  Here's a rhyme about 5 and 5 eggs:

 

9.  The elevator song, from Riverton Branch Library:

and10. 5 Elephants in the Bathtub, by Jbrary:

 

 Bonus activity 11: Initial letter worksheets

 I'm not big on worksheets for preschool, but I know sometimes they're helpful, and some children enjoy them. This week I put together an initial sound alphabet, 26 coloring pages that focus on the first letter sound in words.  If you and your littles are working on initial sounds and they enjoy coloring, please consider supporting my blog by checking out this (and other) resources in my TeachersPayTeachers store.

I hope these ideas keep you and your little ones happily learning this week!  Remember to tag me on Instagram @paulabeckerman2399 or Paula's Primary Classroom on FaceBook if you try any of these ideas.  I LOVE seeing your happy, smiling, engaged children (and once a month I choose someone who has tagged me to win $10 worth of free resources)!

See you Wednesday for a list of books to accompany your letter E learning!

Letter E (part two)

About ten years ago I attended a training by Janet Chambers, a teacher-author who shared wonderful ideas about teaching literacy.  One of her ideas that really stuck with me was that of a "big event" to introduce each letter of the alphabet.  Ever since, we've had an alphabet worth of big events here at school each year. (See her book, Ready, Set, READ here.)

For the letter E, I've put together a small Easter basket of plastic eggs, each with something that begins with the letter e: envelope, Elmo, toy eggs, elephants - and some that are empty.  The kiddos LOVE it!

 I also took two groups of children to the zoo, to see the elephants (and of course, other animals.)

 

 I have to admit, I was surprised that the children had an idea in mind for the letter E, and were quite insistent that we do their activity: an Easter egg hunt.  I certainly didn't mind, I had that in mind myself, but I think it says something about the relevance of the activity, that the children who reviewed E with egg hunts last April remember it, and wanted to revisit it.  Not for candy, our eggs were empty every time except for our Good Friday egg hunt.  They loved the hiding and the seeking.  Needless to say, I dug out 6 dozen eggs, some baskets, buckets from the sandbox, and we had at it! 

 The kiddos hid the eggs (usually in a big clump, in "their" spot, so they could find them again quickly.)

 We lined up, and....

 Go!

 We hid and found the eggs over and over!

.

Next week, letter F!

Letter E activities (part one)

I'd start by saying it's been another busy week here at school, but really, when is it not?  There are always so many fun things we want to do,  and the backyard always beckons us too, so it is always busy.  Children are very busy people, constantly doing and learning!  

As we do each week, we made our hand print alphabet crafts: eagles and elephants this week.

 Getting paint on our hands is a fun sensory experience, and adding the details to the dried prints works out our fine motor skills, and results in a project that our moms and dads will treasure.  Sounds like a winner to me!

 We played Elefun, a game that's been around for a very long time, and is still cool!  The children love being able to turn it on and off, to catch or pick up the butterflies, and to put them back in so they can play it over again.  They practiced taking turns and working together, and look at their faces - pure joy!  Several times they broke into spontaneous jumping and clapping and giggling, which is a lovely thing to watch!

 We identified and matched shapes and colors with a scrambled eggs game too.

 On this particular day we had read Humpty Dumpty, and the kiddos got to work together to make a giant Humpty Dumpty puzzle. 

 It wouldn't be Humpty Dumpty day without an egg on a wall!  This idea came from Mrs. Kelly's Kindergarten, and the children LOVE it!

 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.  We knew he was going to have a great fall!  I put down different surfaces for him to fall on, and the children predicted whether Humpty would break on each one.  Felt?  He cracked!

 Pee-ew, he smells like a hard boiled egg!  (Some children thought that smelled good, but it was much more fun to pretend it was stinky!)

 Humpty also took turns falling on cotton balls, and paper towels.  Do you wonder if he broke?  You'll have to hard boil and egg and try it yourself!  I will tell you that falling all the way to the floor was not a good plan for Humpty!  The children wanted us to drop him again and again, they really liked seeing - and hearing - him hit the ground!

 So what on earth can we do to follow that up?  :-)  We're making scrambled eggs for lunch, of course!

Happy Pig Day!

Oinky oink oink! 

For those of you familiar with the Elephant and Piggy books by Mo Willems, no translation is necessary, but just in case you have missed the book Happy Pig Day!, "Oinky oink oink!" means Happy Pig Day!

We love Mo Willems, and read all the Pigeon books last week, so this week we read all the Elephant and Piggy books we could find.  I have 10 of them... okay, I had 8, but bought 2 more last week in preparation for this unit.  I had to!  (I have a compulsion about children's books.  I know the first step in recovery is admitting there is a problem... but I like it, and don't want to recover!)

You should know that there are a LOT of websites with awesome ideas about how to celebrate Elephant and Piggy.  Mo Willems' official site is awesome, as is http://www.pigeonpresents.com/.  You can also see the free event kit - designed for libraries and classrooms - for Elephant and Piggy books at http://www.pigeonpresents.com/teachersguides/EandP_eventkit2013.pdf.  I found a lot of my ideas there.

This idea came from Abby the Librarian.  I printed pigeon and duckling pictures from the event kit mentioned above, and the children chose which to color.

We glued a coffee filter onto a foam bowl.  I would have preferred paper, but foam is what we had.  They tore different shades of brown construction paper, and glued them to the coffee filter on the outside of the bowl.  I cut pieces of yarn that were long enough to tie on the children's heads and under their chins.  Cut these longer than you think you need, it's better to have a little more to work with!  I showed the kiddos how to sew the yarn up into the base of the bowl and back down - this created the loop to tie it to their heads.

 We cut out their Pigeon or duckling picture, and taped it in the "nest" we'd created.  I hot glued some Easter grass and plastic eggs around the birds.  Here we are, responding to the book There's a Bird on Your Head!

Another of our favorite Elephant and Piggy books is I Am Invited To A Party! In this book, Elephant and Piggy prepare for a party - and wonder if it is a fancy party, a pool party, or a costume party.  They dress for all three at the same time!  

We prepared for all kinds of parties by mix and matching costume pieces.  The kiddos LOVED having costume play, and I love that it was also tied in to a literature unit.  These kiddos are obviously ready for a fire fighter party...

 ... any kind of costume party...

 ... a mad scientist construction worker karate party....

 ... and a fancy cheer leader party.

 We chose a picture of each child (I also have a photography problem, and take hundreds of pictures of the kiddos each week) dressed up for the party, and made a class book.  The text says: "(Name) is ready for a ______  ______ party."   Here's our cover:

Another class book we made this week was an innovation on I'm A Frog!  The children put the words "I am a...." in order and glued them at the top of their page, then completed the sentence.

 We really like to make class books, partly because the children love to read the books they've helped to make, and partly because I take advantage of this fact by having them order words, complete sentences, and illustrate their writing, so I can bind it into books.  We made a book telling what we want to do for "Happy Pig Day" - which was on Friday.

The children all wanted to dress up some more, or eat "pig food" like in the book.  Pig food doesn't sound appetizing to you?  In the illustrations to the book, Elephant and Piggy eat fruit and cookies.  Now you know the attraction!

 We made piggy hats too!  I bought a couple of sheets of neon pink poster board, and cut it into 2" strips.  (Each poster board made 11.)  The children cut out contrasting pink circles, and added nostrils.  I measured and stapled the pink strips to fit each kiddo, and trimmed several inches of extra paper from the ends.  With the extras, we were able to cut triangle ears to add to our hats.  Little piggy eye balls finished it off.  Aren't they adorable?!

Earlier in the week, when we first read Happy Pig Day!, the children noticed the confetti on the end papers, and wanted a confetti party.  I said no, real quick!  Confetti?  It would be all over the classroom.  The children would get wild and crazy and out of control.  No way! 

During the week I changed my mind.  Part of my teaching philosophy is

"When we engage children in rich experiences and make learning joyful, they learn to love learning, and become lifelong learners. To this end we must provide learning materials and experiences that are engaging and meaningful to the child."

That being said, I knew I had to provide the learning materials and the experience, because it was something meaningful to the children.  Yes, it would be all over the place, but a vacuum would fix that.  If we were going to get wild and crazy, we could do it right before heading outside to play... so we did it!  I am so glad I let the children have the confetti! 

I started by seating everyone ready for a group photo.  I showed them the bag of confetti, and told them we would have one chance to throw it for the picture.  If they threw it early, they wouldn't have any for the picture, but if they could wait, we would all have some.  We practiced throwing together (empty handed) on the count of 3, and quickly mastered it.  Everyone held out their hands for a small pile of confetti, we posed, we counted, and.... ta-da!

 The kiddos scooped it all back up, tossed it again and again, rolled in it, made snow angels in it... and I remembered being a kid.

I grew up in Australia, and confetti was a staple at weddings.  I remember my parents trying to keep me out of the used confetti on the ground afterwards, but there were always children scavenging for the colorful pieces of paper, wanting to throw it over and over.  Today my students reminded me of myself at their age, only this time I was the adult in charge, and was able to say, "Yes!"

Here they all are, laying in the spent confetti.  That $1 packet of confetti bought them at least $10 worth of joy.  I'm smiling as I think about it, and maybe you are too.  Awesome value for some tiny bits of paper!

We encouraged good behavior choices this week with piggy stamps, and this afternoon got out elephant stamps too.

We finished the week off with a Happy Pig Day snack time.  We wore our pig hats, and ate the pig food the children were writing about earlier in the day: applesauce, pink cherry juice, and cookies - no nuts (sorry Pigeon!).

 At snack time one of the kiddos asked if I would get out the corn for them to play in outside - because, he said, Piggy would like it.  What could I say.  Now the children are as happy as pigs in... corn!

Oinky oink oink!