For the last three days of spring break, the older two kiddos went away for a few days. G3 and I got to hang out and do everything by her schedule, which was really cool! We had a variety of springtime and Easter activities to keep us busy.

On day 1, we started things off by making our own little flower garden out of popsicle sticks and cupcake wrappers. It was, of course, completely intentional to have a “container” as the flower, because once they dried, we used them as the base for a counting, adding, and subtracting activity with little yellow pom poms for pollen. I put a number in each flower and dumped a few pom poms in, and then G3 used tweezers (which she soon got tired of and switched to her fingers) to make sure the right number of pollen was inside each flower.

I also put some of our letters inside Easter eggs and hid them around the room. After she found them, she identified the letter and matched it to the right place on the alphabet placemat.

Finally, she made a jumping rabbit out of a paper cup. She decorated the outside (I helped her with the mouth but the rest was all G3!) and then I put a rubber band underneath. When you stack it on top of another cup, the rubber band launched it up into the air.

On day 2, we started by doing a science experiment on chromatography. We colored a dark line of marker on a coffee filter, and then put it in a small jar of water. As the water seeps through the filter, it drags the marker along with it and, if you’re lucky, gives you a bit of a rainbow of colors! Black worked the best for us. Others were still fun to watch spread across the papers and make patterns based on how the line was drawn or the paper was folded. Later in the day after they’d dried, we turned them into butterflies.

We also started working on our foil Easter eggs. We used hot glue to create a pattern on cardboard, then covered it with foil, and (while heavily supervised!) used sharpies to add color to the foil. I made one alongside G3, and I think if she did it again she would add a lot more hot glue to create the relief patterns as she only had a couple drops on there.

On day 3, we started by finishing up our foil eggs. We also made rabbits out of our handprints - probably won’t do that activity again (maybe with older kids? I had to do a lot of it for G3, which kinda defeats the purpose of having activities geared toward her strengths and needs, but overall it wasn’t terribly exciting).

Finally, we wrapped up our springtime and Easter week with paintings of cherry blossoms, which are in full bloom around here right now! We used watercolor for the trunks, globbing a whole heap of it onto the paper and using a straw to blow it across the page and create branches. Once that dried, we used a q-tip to add our blossoms.