Before you throw away plastic Easter Eggs, try this fun learning game first! This screen-free math and language arts experience uses content from a learning website, IXL, that is completely tailored to a child’s learning needs. Shake — or scramble — things up with this hands-on game for an EGGcelent learning experience.

Gather learning material for the game

As I’ve covered in many previous articles my children use IXL on a regular basis to help maintain their skills and prepare to move ahead into new learning opportunities without a struggle.

For this game you need to have your children complete around 1 hour of the IXL diagnostic. They get to choose which questions to answer based on their interests. If a question is too hard, they can click a button to say they don’t know it yet.

Since my children did about 10 minutes a day of the diagnostic for 6 days, their account was all set up with clear information about their next steps, which was useful when I prepared the game!

After the diagnostic develops a clear picture of your child’s learning, the website provides recommendations. These are tailored to your child based on how they answered the diagnostic questions.

If you use IXL on a regular basis completing the recommendations matters because it helps tailor future recommended skills to your child.

Even though my children enjoy the success they find in the classroom after preparing through IXL lessons, over time they can get bored with the routine.

After Easter I decided to hatch a new learning plan!

Choose skills to focus on

Since my fourth grader and my first grader each have their own recommendations, I made a separate batch with questions and answers that would individually challenge them. I included some review questions, I added some that would go just beyond what they already know, and I tossed in a few super duper challenge questions.

When I found a skill that was easy to write on the eggs, I logged into IXL in my parent account to get more of that type of question and the answers.

Using several types of skill helped create variety, which motivated my children, because they could choose what type of problem to complete.

Set up the matching egg game

Setting up the game takes a little prep work, but it was well worth it when I saw my children excited to work on challenging questions.

When I was preparing the game, first I matched up all the eggs. I wrote a question and an answer on each side.

All of the eggs go in a basket in a space with a work mat for sorting the eggs. I also included an Easter basket for the matched eggs and either a whiteboard or pencil and paper for working out problems.

Sorting the eggs encourages children to learn challenging concepts with the simplicity of matching the questions and answers.

My children were really EGGcited that I used a creative approach by preparing a game for them!

If you are interested in discovering more hands-on learning ideas, make sure to follow Enjoying Family Life on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube.