5 Alloprof Resources to Help You Celebrate Easter with Your Students

Children can’t wait for Easter to arrive so they can start hunting for eggs. The schoolyard or classroom can be the stage for a treasure hunt sprinkled with educational challenges. At the end, students can be rewarded with some chocolate or candy, or a privilege. Here are a few ideas to incorporate certain subjects into the activity:

• Easter word hunt: Hide various words in plastic eggs for students to find (related to Easter, subjects studied in class, or new words). After the hunt, divide the class into groups of two or three and ask them to pool their words together to create sentences or even a story.
• Math challenge: Each hidden egg can contain a math problem or equation. Students will have to solve the problem before they can look for another egg.
• Science or history questions: You can hide questions related to science or history in eggs. They can be true-or-false questions or even puzzles. Students, working in teams, must answer questions correctly to continue searching or collect points.
• Nature hunt: This activity is ideal for classes with access to a schoolyard or park. Hide pictures or names of local trees and plants in the eggs. Students will have to find them outside!
• Relay race: Why not breathe new life into the traditional Easter egg hunt? To win an egg for their team, students will have to go to a station and complete a quick educational activity (such as doing a math question, reading a paragraph out loud, or conjugating a verb). From the word go, the team divides up the tasks and completes them, and then to the starting line with an egg if they are successful. For this activity, you can integrate Alloprof resources into the different learning stations. Here are some suggestions:
  • Play Fin lapin and practise math
  • Play Potager en péril, where our hero, a carrot, learns about different parts of speech (link in French only)
  • In Book of Spells, read “Lucy the Bunny and the Park” and answer the questions
  • Practise a spring-related vocabulary in French using the list in Voca or Magimot (here’s the list code: 5v16h)
  • Create acrostic poems using Easter words (chocolate, rabbit, chick, eggs, etc.)
  • Etc.

Not only does using eggshells as seedling pots give new meaning to one of the symbols of Easter, the egg, but it also helps draw a link to spring. With this activity, you can reuse shells as natural, nutrient-rich, biodegradable pots as well as the empty cartons to hold them. What’s more, gardening at school allows students to make observations about plant anatomy and make hypotheses.

For this activity, you’ll need:

• 12 eggshells in good condition

• An empty egg carton that holds 12 eggs

• Vegetable, herb, or flower seeds (radish, pea, squash, melon, tomato, zucchini, sweet pea, nasturtium…). You can also get some free seeds (and maybe even borrow some gardening equipment) at one of Montreal’s public libraries. You can also see if a similar service is offered in your area

• Potting soil in a small container

• A teaspoon to put the potting soil in the eggshells

• A large needle

• A pencil or felt-tip pen

• A sprayer

Instructions:

• Poke a small hole into the bottom of each shell to allow water to drain out.

• Use the teaspoon to add potting soil to the shells.

• Plant one to three seeds per eggshell, depending on the size.

• Cover with potting soil (see the sowing depth recommended on your seed sachets).

• Put the eggshells back in the carton, which provides support.

• Spray them with water.

• Use the pencil or pen to write the name of the plant on the top of the shell.

• Place in a spot with light, and water them regularly with the sprayer to keep the soil moist. Don’t spray them too much.

Students can watch their seedlings grow. Later, you can transplant them if students want to plant them in a garden. To do this, gently break each shell and its inner membrane and place the seedlings in the ground, in a pot or in a window box.

Ask your students if they think eggs break easily, and most will say yes! Why not conduct an experiment to test out this theory? Here’s a science activity to try out with your students to test the impressive strength of an egg.

Materials:

• Raw eggs

• A cutting board or another flat, solid object

• Eight rolls of tape (or anything else that can hold an egg upright, like an eggcup)

• Weights (dumbbells, bricks, heavy books, rocks, cans, etc.)

• A large plastic bag or tablecloth to keep the work table clean if one of the eggs breaks

• A scale

Instructions:

Set an egg in the tape roll (or other egg holder), narrow end up. Place a second roll of tape (or other egg holder) on top of the egg. Add bricks (or other weights) to the scale until you get to 4 kg. To avoid breaking and wasting eggs, do not exceed 4 kg. Place the cutting board (or another flat, solid object like a thin book) on top of the top roll of tape, then carefully stack the weights on top. The egg will stay intact!

Then, ask students how much weight they think four eggs arranged in a square can support. If the weights are properly centered, the eggs will support up to 16 kg without breaking.

Alloprof has fun Easter pictures. Your students can try and spot the seven differences between each pair, and then colour them. You can decorate the classroom with them afterwards! This activity is an excellent way to help elementary school students develop certain skills:

• Visual attention and observation skills

• Concentration

• Visual memory

• Patience and perseverance

• Etc.

Finally, if students work in small groups, this can also foster teamwork and communication skills, since they can discuss what they find together to solve the challenge more effectively.

Our math mosaic, which reveals an Easter picture when solved, is a creative approach to integrate art into learning elementary math. Each mosaic uses a different type of operation. After they use mental math to find the answers, students use the key to see which answers correspond to each colour.