Hoppy Spring!

We did a variety of Spring activities last week. Since we have several families that don't celebrate Easter, I focused more on Spring this year. We did have an egg hunt and my wonderfully supportive families allowed everyone to participate.

Since we were noticing the signs of Spring all around us, I put a few twigs in our playdough center so friends could make Spring Trees.

We made these cute chicks I posted in Baby Chicks In A Nest. Originally, we were going to put pom poms as eggs in the nest, but the friends wanted to use googly eyes, so the idea turned into something better than I had planned! This was an important reminder for me to allow for the creativity of my students~~ their ideas are pretty great!

Excellence In Early Childhood posted a cute caterpillar activity using Press N Seal wrap. I thought I would try it for the window clings we usually make with contact paper. Our director found these cute egg, chick and bunny foamies, so the friends were not as interested in using the colored tissue. On some of the last eggs, we experimented with adding glue to see how that would work.

On Thursday, we dyed eggs and experimented with mixing colors. Friday morning,  our arrival activity was graphing jellybeans. For breakfast, we had the jellybeans we counted and the eggs we'd dyed, with our cereal. Peeling the eggs was great fine motor practice. I was very surprised at the number of friends who liked the hard boiled eggs!

Later, we had some of the parents come and hide eggs on our playground. We had a great egg hunt. When we finished, we put all the eggs in one basket and counted them and divided them up. (Some of the friends had parent helpers and were really good hunters and others spent a lot of time, but only found a few eggs. I felt dividing them was the fair way to go, plus it added a math component to the activity.) The friends got to pick which eggs they wanted to take home.

I decided to have several smaller activities over the course of a couple of days, rather than having a big party. We have so many parties that sometimes, I like to mix it up and do things a little differently. Our final activity on Friday was to decorate cupcakes with chick peeps like a nest. I bought Chow Mein Noodles to use for the nesting material, but forgot to take them to school, so we just made them without the noodles.

I sent my friends home on Friday, all sugared up and ready for their Easter weekend. I am thankful that we are now on Spring Break, so they will have a full week to get all that sugar out of their systems before I see them again!