ABC Egg Game

I'm going to go ahead and admit that I like activites that my kids can do by themselves.  Especially during quiet time, it's nice when Hadley can find something to do that she doesn't require my assistance.  The challenge is finding things she likes to do because otherwise she wants to watch TV for the amount of time Harper takes a nap.  That can be anywhere between 2 - 3 hours.  That's a whole lot of Jake and the Neverland Pirates.

Lately, Hadley's been interested in working on practicing letters, writing and reading words, and figuring out their sounds.  She has an assortment of workbooks that help her with this, and those are fun to watch her complete, but one game that's been a hit in our home the last several days is what I like to call "The ABC Egg Game."  I took the idea from a blogger who writes the blog, "Rub Some Dirt On It."  You can find the post here.  The entire blog is worth a look or two.  She has adorable children, tells great stories (my favorite post so far is about her finding an animal skull in the yard during her one year old's birthday party), and is really creative. 

This activity is very simple to put together, and you probably already have the materials on hand.....unless you're super organized and threw out all the plastic Easter eggs.  In that case, nevermind.

Here's what you do.  Get yourself 26 plastic eggs.

Write an uppercase and lower case letter on each egg.  One per egg, and one letter on each half. (Do I even need to write that?)
Break the eggs apart, put them in a bag (I used an old Starbucks bag), and shuffle them around a bit.  Then, go get your child who might or might not be watching Jake and the Neverland Pirates, and tell her that you made a game for her.

Explain how it works (match up the letters), and then walk away.  You're golden.  Go cook yourself some dinner.  Check email, Facebook, or I hear Twitter is all the rage these days.  Whatever you do, there is plenty of time to do it because this game takes TIME.

And look how happy?  Trust me, it's a fabulous game.  And you know that the kids are doing something educational AND fun at the same time.  That's a good thing.  Otherwise, you leave them alone to play and they end up creating scenes like this one:

What in the world is going on here?