Matching Fun with Egg Cartons

This is a little game I came up with around Easter, but this can be good all year round. You can use it for Easter, food, farming or any other theme you can relate to eggs. Even if you aren’t doing anything with eggs, it’s useful for color recognition for toddlers and even some preschoolers who aren’t sure of their colors. I only had one package of the plastic Easter eggs for this activity, but you can buy other packages that may have more colors. I took the eggs apart, put one set of halves in the carton and left the rest out so the kids could put the same colored halves together. This of course makes the whole dozen eggs. For a better color variety, you could buy different colored large marbles or balls and color or paint the cups of the carton. That way you wouldn’t have to use the same color twice.


For preschoolers, you can write numbers 1 through 12 on the eggs and then write the numbers 1 through 12 on the egg carton for practice with number recognition. The preschoolers I’ve worked with have had to do this several times before they could do it on their own. The first couple of times were spent just looking at the numbers and then they understood that the numbers matched on the carton. This works well with doing a variety of other sorting and matching activities so the concept of numbers and counting sink in.