Target : For us the main aim of a party class is to give students a break from studying, relax, and learn a little about western culture. Besides the egg and spoon race and the Easter egg hunt, there aren’t many traditional games played at Easter, so we try to find games that involve balls (representing eggs), foxes, chickens, lambs, and other Easter words.
Lesson length : 40 to 50 minutes
Class size : Small Group class
Preparation time : 15 – 20 minutes to prepare the “Tube Marble Race”, 60 – 120 minutes to prepare the “Fox Teeth Shooter” game, 5-10 minutes to prepare the “Eliminiation game”, and 20 – 30 minutes per egg (Because this craft requires glue to dry, prepare atleast a week before) to prepare “Self-Righting Eggs” and flashcards.
Materials :
- For “Easter Word Scramble” game : A pack of 20 plastic eggs, labelled with points based on the difficulty of the words inside; A selection of words of differing difficulties for children to spell, cut into their individual letters and placed inside the eggs.
- For “Elimination game” : Plastic eggs to place around the room, or in absence of eggs, ping pong balls work well .
- For “Fox Teeth Shooter” : A cheap rubber suction dart shooting gun; a whiteboard; magnets or board pieces to represent the chickens (one chicken for each team) and fox.
- For “Marble Dyed Eggs” : Tools to remove the contents of eggs; one or two eggs for each student, with the eggs’ contents removed, and scewered through its base and top with a thin wooden scewer; various colour nail varnish; small plastic tubs to put water into.
We made our fox head for the “Fox Teeth Shooter” from cardboard and hung it from the top of the whiteboard, but it would work just as well just drawing the fox head to the board with a marker. We cut a wide mouth so that we could draw lots of teeth inside. Our shooter was bought at a local thrift shop in Japan for 100 yen. In the example above the chickens are represented by blue magnets, and the fox by a green magnet, but teacher may like to make more realistic looking characters for their own games.
Instructions
1. Write the word Easter on the board and brainstorm Easter vocabulary with the class. Teach students some additional Easter vocabulary, such as “lay an egg”, “hatch”, etc. Teachers can find free flashcards at the website https://en.islcollective.com/
2. Play the “Easter Word Scramble” game : Instructions can be accessed by left-clicking the button below.imination
4. Play the “Elimination Game” : Instructions can be accessed by left-clicking the button below.
5. If time permits, play the “Fox Teeth Shooter” game : Draw a fox head with it’s mouth open on the whiteboard (Or you can make the head from cardboard and hang it over the whiteboard. Draw 15-20 big sharp teeth in the mouth of the fox. Write numbers from 1-4 in the centre of each tooth. Draw a path of 20 seeds on the board under the fox head for the chicken characters to follow, and a goal point (preferably a chicken hutch) to represent safety. Position the chickens on the 17th seed from the goal and the fox character on the 20th seed. Assign one chicken to each team. Each turn students fire the plastic gun at the mouth of the fox. If they are able to hit a tooth, wipe the tooth out with your board eraser, and move the team’s chicken the number indicated by the tooth along the seeds. Should students miss a tooth, the fox moves one seed closer to the chickens. If the fox reaches a chicken, that team is eliminated. If a team reaches the goal point, the team has won.
6. Make and Easter craft with the class : The "Marble Easter Egg" craft is interesting and unique enough that even older children can enjoy it. Each student drips nail varnish into a tub of water, then styles the colours into shapes and patterns using toothpicks. Once they are happy with the shapes, they take their skewered eggs and dip them into the water to due the eggs, then remove them from the water and allow them to dry.