By Laila Weir
Who says Easter baskets have to be filled with all sweets? Lighten up on the sugar a bit and add some enrichment to your child’s Easter with a few fun and literacy-supporting Easter basket gifts. Below you’ll find links to tutorials for three Easter-themed recycled art projects. They’ll teach you to make totally free, eco-friendly, and easy DIY Easter basket stuffers!
What’s more, they’re educational: All three projects support oral language development and key early literacy skills that lead into important aspects of reading and writing.
You’ll learn to turn plastic Easter eggs into maracas and how to use them to develop your child’s rhyming skills. You’ll discover how to make old building blocks into storytelling dice that you can use to engage your child in spinning tall tales. And you’ll get instructions and printable templates for upgrading a paper lunch bag into an adorable bunny puppet, along with tips on how to use it in a fun literacy activity.
If you want another way to celebrate Easter with your little one and build their early literacy skills at the same time, read Chrysta Naron’s post on how to help your kid learn to read with a sight-word Easter hunt, too!
Easter Bunny Paper Bag Puppet
In this sweet Easter craft and activity, you’ll learn how to make an easy but adorable Rhyming Rabbit Easter Bunny puppet. Then you’ll help your child use their bunny to recite rhymes, from nursery rhymes and songs they know to beginner poems to come up with themselves. Using the bunny makes rhyming more fun, but it also has a deeper benefit: Reciting through a puppet can help children feel less self-conscious and free your budding poet or songster to get as lyrical or silly as they like.
Upcycled Plastic Easter Egg Maracas
In this super-easy, two-step craft, you’ll upcycle old plastic eggs into colorful musical instruments to welcome in the spring with a vibrant lyrical celebration. These cute maraca-style shakers are perfect for getting kids moving and learning! Check out the link for the instructions, plus detailed tips on how to use your child’s new shaker for maximum brain-building benefit.
Recycled Storytelling Dice
We love storytelling dice to get the ball rolling on inventing stories together with your child. This helps kids enrich their oral language, deepen their comprehension, expand their vocabularies, and develop key skills underpinning reading fluency. Plus, it’s a super fun game to play together! Sure, you could buy some of the many storytelling dice out there, but why not save the planet and your pocketbook by making your own from recycled materials, instead? In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to upcycle a couple of old building blocks into your own Easter-themed DIY storytelling dice.
