5 Ways to Use Plastic Eggs to Practice Literacy Skills

We all have them! Those bags of plastic Easter eggs from the Dollar Store. We store them in our classroom closets waiting for the weeks leading up to Easter to break them out and use them.

Now is the time to start thinking about how to use them this year. I am going to share 5 ways you can use your plastic eggs to practice literacy skills. Click any of the images to take a look at the pack of recording sheets.

Sight Word Egg Hunt

This is an absolute favourite with my students. I always save this activity for the day before Easter break. To prep the activity I put a word wall word inside each of the eggs and hide them around the classroom when my students are out of the room. When they come back in I make a big deal of the fact that we are having an egg hunt. I also make sure that everyone understands that once they find an egg and they record it they put it back where they found it. You can grab this FREE activity, complete with an editable word list and recording sheet by clicking this image.

Contraction Match

Write the 2 words that make up a contraction on one-half of the egg and the contraction on the other half of the egg. Place the egg halves in a basket and students have to match them up. You can make the task more challenging by ensuring that the coloured halves don't necessarily match when the contraction and two words are matched up.

Compound Words

This activity will yield lots of funny words but lots of real compound words too. Write each part of a compound word on a half of an egg. Students will then snap two halves together and see if it creates a compound word. You can make it more challenging by writing the parts of the compound word on different colours of eggs.

Unscramble the Words

I place scrabble tiles (or any other letter tiles) in a plastic egg. Students open the egg and dump out the letters and unscramble them to spell a word wall word.

Spin and Read Word Families

Review your long and short vowel word families with this fun activity. Students choose an egg from the basket and spin the letters around so that they match up to spell a word family word. They read the words to a partner and then listen to their partner read the words on their eggs.

All of these activities will keep your students engaged. I use recording sheets for all of these activities for accountability. Often I slide the page into a page protector so that students are able to use dry erase markers instead and then they take a picture of their finished work. If you are interested in these pages you can find then by clicking the image below. It includes the pages for the last 4 activities shared here as well as pages for 5 math activities that I will be blogging about this week as well.

Easter Worksheets to use with plastic eggs to practice literacy skills like compound words, word families and contractions.

Are you looking for ideas to use these eggs in your Math time as well? Head over to the next post where I share all about ways to use plastic Easter eggs to practice math skills.