can 3 year olds at a party decorate hard boiled eggs, do you reckon?

[mrsbaldwin]

So, I have 20 3 year-olds coming to an Easter egg hunting party. Thanks to advice on the rest of the topic I have some good ideas about the actual hunt. But for the activity to keep them busy as they come in I was thinking about 'decorate the hard boiled egg'. Is this too hard for 3 year olds? We could do 'decorate the cardboard basket to carry the eggs in' instead? Your help appreciated with this important question of global significance!

hard boiled egg is okay I think - my 3yo did one the other day! But you will need lots of egg cups (or cut up egg boxes?) because lots will struggle to hold them and paint them at the same time.

I wouldn't bank on many of them spending a long time decorating them, but I'm sure they all would give it a go. You do have a lot of grown up helpers, don't you ?

Great party bag idea too.

Just finished with dd2 aged 3 ...very messy even though it was in an egg cup, paint on her and her pinny. Also on the newspaper. It diddn't keep her occupied for more than 5/ 10 mins. What did keep her happier was sticking previously cut shapes of a bunny on a paper with an egg drawn on it. She sorted them and thenstuck them together, took slightly more time and was less messy. We also made a cardboard ring and stuck on a bunny, flowers and a carrot- wrote happy easter and its now on the kitchen door.

Hmm - DD2 (just 5) found this quite hard and messy when she tried it last week. Putting stickers on it was much easier than painting it, we discovered. If I were you, I'd print off loads of these for them to colour instead, but then I'm lazy !

...yes I should probably point out DD did drop her egg down herself and get glitter and paint all over the place.

The basket is probably easier, but you will need to make them all up in advance.

As long as you have an egg cup to put the egg in whilst decorating they should be fine, though personally i would probably make lots of paper baskets out of white card and then give them those to decorate with glitter glues, stickers, pens etc - that way they will have something to put their eggs in whilst doing the easter egg hunt.

Finger-paints is the way to go.

We did it at toddler group - each child has a section of egg box to stand their egg in, although at the idea of 20 of them.....at home?

When I did a hunt at home (for 8!) they decorated paper lunch bags with stickers etc to use as baskets for the hunt.

Aha - thanks for all the replies.

So, in the time it took to post this, go away and come back I tried an eggsperiment (sorry) with my DS. Yes, Rosa you are right - he did it for about 5 mins only.

I love some of these other ideas - paper bag decorating included. I might swap that for the baskets - bit easier!

Thanks for the printout link Bramshott.

It's not at home - I hired a (large) local venue. But I have to say I am now thinking 'er blimey 20 x 3 yr-olds, am I nuts?' I have a massive collection of mini eggs ready to be hunted. I am trying to keep them out of my own gob :)