Thursday, April 23, 2009

Thinking Thursday: Hide and Seek

If your home is like ours, there are empty plastic Easter eggs scattered about, finding their way into hidden corners and under furniture. Once the candy is gone, it's a bit of a let down or maybe we're just crashing after the sugar rush! Either way, Sammi is ready to hunt those eggs again.

Little ones love repetition. They learn so much from doing the exact same thing over and over. They start to understand that consequences are the same for a given action; they are able to improve motor skills; and they are developing confience in their understanding and skills.

Since Sammi has had a hard time letting the Easter eggs disappear back into the holiday box, we've adapted Easter egg hunting and she's having a ball! For snack time I'll grab a few eggs and put her snacks in them. I fill them with dried blueberries, Cheerios, pretzels, and sometimes chocolate chips or other very special treats. Then Sammi hides out in the bathroom while I hide them around the room. Once she finds them all, she gets to choose one egg to open and eat the contents. Then we hide them all again (including the empty one) and she searches once more.

At this point in her development, she loves to find them in the same place again and again. So the second time I'll hide them all in the same place and then after that I'll move one or two to new hiding places. We usually hide them four times. Eventually she offers to hide them for me to find. So I dutifully hide out in the bathroom while she hides the eggs. It's adorable because not only does she hide them in exactly the same places I do, she walks me around the room and shows me where they all are! We still have a bit to learn about hide and seek!

But for now, hunting snack Easter eggs is a great way to relive the glory of the hunt, practice hiding and seeking, prolonging snack time, and gearing up for next year!

Photo courtesy of Century Novelty

3 comments:

Kirsten said...

I love that she shows you where she hid the eggs. So cute! :)

kelli said...

Great reminder I use to do this when my older kids were little. They had so much fun!

Kelly said...

That is so cute! What a great idea about putting the snacks in the eggs! I'll have to try that!

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