Dying pipe cleaner Easter eggs

I wanted my class to have a chance to dye some Easter eggs without having to boil dozens of eggs. So I reused an idea we had already done before only this time, we made Easter eggs…

When the children arrived to preschool, I invited them to join me on the floor to make egg shapes out of white chenille stems (pipe cleaners)…

Everyone dove right in and started bending and twisting their pipe cleaners to make lots of eggs. It took a little practice for some of the children but after a bit, most of the children caught on. Some of our eggs didn’t always look all that “egg-shaped” but fine motor skills were at work throughout the morning…

Once we had a good number of egg shapes to work with, the children put them up on the table and then joined me back to finish our morning circletime routine…

At the end of circletime, we took a quick minute to put a little bit of Easter grass in baggies to prepare them for our egg dying process.  The baggies were our “Easter baskets” to store our completed eggs in later on…

And then some of the children went off to the table to begin the egg-dying process…

I covered a table with a few layers of paper towels and set out three cups of colored water (water with red, blue and yellow food color added). The children dipped their eggs into the colored water and then placed the colored eggs in their Easter baggies…

We had lots of eggs so the children could spend as much time exploring this process as they liked…

Once the children had dyed their eggs and put them in their Easter baggies, they closed up the baggies and put them in their cubbies to take home at the end of the day…

This activity was a great alternative to dying real eggs in the classroom.  The dying process was similar but saved me from having to boil a bunch of real eggs!

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