10 Ways to Play with Empty Eggs

Happy Spring fellow SLPs! The thing I know about spring is that it is busy.

This post is titled “10 Ways to play with empty eggs, but the true and alternative title is…

I love the idea of making some amazing Easter Egg activities for speech therapy. That sounds easy enough, but usually I wind up walking to a classroom with a plastic bag of eggs that haven’t been prepped, stuffed, or crafted. Most years they are still in the bag I bought them in. (Why can’t I ever find last year’s eggs?) That’s the honest truth. Nobody has time to cut out and stuff dozens of stimulus pictures into eggs. So I don’t! Here are 10 ways to play with plain, empty, regular Easter eggs in preschool!

1. Color Sorting. So many of my lower functioning kids are hard to get to do a task I choose, but they are always happy to clean up. I start with all my eggs out in the space and have them “clean up” and sort by color.
2. Magic Color. Use any stimulus item and have the students pick up an egg on each turn. At the end of the “game” reveal which color was the “magic color”. The student with the most eggs of that color is the winner.
3. Positional Concepts. Hide the eggs around the room and give positional concepts in your directions to find the eggs (under the chair, behind the computer, etc.)
4. Tapping Syllables. Open the eggs and place them on the table. Place two eggs next to each other so you have four halves in front of your student. Tap on each egg part as you tap out syllables in multi-syllabic words. You can do the same thing to expand MLU is students.
5. Pronouns. Lots of my little friends are working on “me” versus “you”. Sharing and exchanging eggs is a great opportunity to target these skills.
6. Negation. Put the eggs in various places around the space. Give directions for pick-up that include “not”. For example, Pick up the eggs, not on the table.
7. Articulation Trials Number Game. Use a sharpie and write random numbers from 1-5 inside each egg. Put “10” in one egg. When the student picks an egg, he will open the egg, read the number, and complete that many trials with their target stimulus word.
8. More/Some/Less. Grab some easter baskets or bins. Put eggs in different bins and then talk about which one has the most, least, more, few, less, etc. After you talk about the quantity concepts, try to make the baskets even.
9. Penny Hunt. Preschoolers just LOVE money. A penny makes them really happy. Sometimes I put a penny in just one of the eggs and have them pull the eggs out of a basket and hunt for the one with a penny. Easy reinforcer!
10. Egg Bowling. Grab dixie cups from the school snack room and make them into bowling pins. Have your students say a target word before they bowl over the pins with an Easter egg.

Happy Egg Hunting!