Easter Egg Color-Sorting Collage

I have two "go-to" blogs that I LOVE checking out for kid crafts--and one of those is I Heart Crafty Things.  I love Rachel's ideas--especially her sensory bins, activity trays, and cutting practice trays (okay, so really ALL her sorting and fine motor activities). :)  You really should check her out...

So with Rachel's crafts on my brain, I was inspired by her genius contact paper collages to make this Easter Egg activity!

Materials you'll need:
1) clear ConTact paper
2) colored Sharpees
3) colored foam pieces or stickers (could also use cut-up tissue paper, jewels, you name it)
4) tape  

I started out by just drawing a large Easter egg-shaped outline on the clear side of contact paper (not the blue-lined graph side), using the colored Sharpees.

Then I decided to divide up our egg with colored lines (based on the colors from the foam stickers I'd snagged from Target).

This ended up being great practice for Ellie!  I'd draw a big "starting" dot on the left and a "finishing" dot on the right side of the egg, and she'd choose if she wanted to do a squiggly or straight line across.  We've been working on reading and writing from left to right, along with correct finger placement for writing her letters and coloring, so I helped her get situated, and she did the lines by herself. :)

Then I got carried away and thought it'd be a great addition to write out the names of the colors in the different spots... (especially because I didn't have yellow and had done that section in green).  Only to realize AFTERWARDS that the words would show up BACKWARDS when I peeled off the contact paper!!!  Whomp whomp....  So I had to improvise.  Oh well!

Note: we poised this a bit after drawing the lines, so I didn't mess with how she was holding the marker. ;)

Okay, SO... to hang up the contact paper, usually you'd just carefully peel back the white paper, then tape the corners to a wall so that the sticky side is facing out.  But since I didn't want the words to get turned around, I ended up having to do an extra step.  I taped the whole thing on the wall, then placed ANOTHER contact paper (sticky side out) on top of it, taping the corners in the same spots.  Phew!  Lesson learned!

Next, I gave her these two Easter plates with the stickers pre-sorted (could also have had her help sort with me, but I wanted to surprise her since she hadn't seen the stickers yet). :)

She jumped right in, putting one sticker in each category for starters.  (Initially she wanted to peel off all the backings on the stickers, but I was able to convince her to keep them on so we can reuse the stickers for another activity!) :)

And then she had fun just filling in all the colors and "decorating" her egg!

 There was one point where I was busy taking pictures :) and didn't notice she was putting different colors in the spots--which would be fine, too, but since we were practicing color sorting and matching, I helped her see what was different and how she could fix it.

It was fun how it also became a bit of a spatial or "puzzle" activity--practicing fitting shapes into spaces and rearranging things or rotating them to help them all fit.

Ta Da!!

Love how it turned out!  Thanks for being the inspiration, Rachel! :)

Other ways to extend this activity--

*Talk about how eggs and Spring relate to Easter (new life; how Jesus makes all things new; Jesus' resurrection!)

*Make the colors in rainbow order, practicing ROYGBIV

*Talk about the parts of a flower and how bees pollinate flowers (works with these specific stickers)

*Mix up the colors at the beginning and have little one sort them.

*Discuss what type of weather characterizes Spring, and what things happen in Spring (rain, green grass, sunny, cool, breeze, clouds, rainbows, Groundhog Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, etc.)