Easter Egg Roll: Indoor Rainy Day Spring STEM Activity For Preschool Kids

Looking for STEM activities to do with your toddler indoors during a rainy Spring Day?

Try Easter Egg Roll! A perfect STEM challenge for preschool kids and beyond! This activity works fine motor skills, engineering, early math concepts, and provides opportunities for color sorting and more! Below I'll share tips for customizing this based on your child's age/developmental. Plus I have 9 more Easter Activities for Toddlers here!


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Supplies

  • Slanting sturdy surface at an incline (I used our Pikler Triangle slide, could also use a cardboard box or shoe rack)
  • Easter Eggs
  • (Optional) pegs/block set/cardboard scraps and painters/masking tape…

Create your incline/maze

For 1 year olds, this could be as simple as just setting up an incline of some sort.

I used the slide of our Pikler triangle. You could honestly use a cardboard box for height, and cut one of the flaps off to use as a slide though. Or if you have a shoe rack that's solid, just tilt that as an inclined surface over a box or your couch. Look around your house and get creative here.

For 2 or 3 year olds or older preschool kids, you may want to make it a bit more interesting by using blocks, 1 inch wide rectangle cardboard scraps, or some other peg (think popsicle glued/taped together, sticks, dowel rods, etc.) to create a maze on your incline for the Easter eggs to bounce around.

We used these wood rectangular pieces for our favorite block set and a little painters tape to create a maze.

STEM Practice:

For all ages, enlist them to help you “build” the slide/ramp – this is where those STEM concepts come in! Ask questions out loud like, “Hmm, what can we use to create an incline? Do you think the couch would work?” This encourages our children to ask questions and stay in the growth/exploratory zone.

Resist the urge to just set it up for them. If creating a maze course, and your egg gets stuck or falls off the track, don't just fix it! Narrate and ask questions again.

“Uh oh, the egg got stuck! Do you think tilting this piece down a little will help it keep moving down the maze? Let's try it!”

Of course, adjust this practice so it's age appropriate and be mindful if your child is getting frustrated/losing interest.

Play! How my toddler (2 year old) enjoyed this activity:

All you're going to do is have your toddler roll the Easter eggs down the incline.

You can also set up some sort of catcher/stopper at the base of the slide if you'd like (another box that's open to collect the eggs or a box that's turned so the eggs come to an abrupt stop and bounce off).

Remember to offer suggestions, ask questions, but as your child gets older, really let them take the lead in setting it up. For instance, for younger toddlers your questions may be more leading, “do you think this wood piece will work for a ramp?”

But as they get older, you can make it more exploratory by saying something like, “Let's look around the house together, what do you think will work well as a ramp?” For older toddlers, show them the video for this post and ask them how they'd like to recreate it with objects in your home!

My toddler really enjoyed this activity, but if I'm honest, her favorite part was building it versus rolling the eggs down it. She really loves tape and stacking things right now.

Set up and clean up time:

This can take you as little as 30 seconds to set up (depending on the supplies in your house) or as long as 30 minutes if you've enlisted your toddler to help your build a maze and let them take the lead. It's really a customizable activity to meet your child where they are at!

Clean up time takes 30 seconds – especially if you've placed an open box at the bottom to collect the eggs.

We simply just leave a basket of Easter eggs out for our daughter this time of year. She always finds new ways to play with them and at 2 years old she collects them and puts them away on her montessori shelf before nap time or bedtime – so mom's clean up time is literally nothing most days!

Pin for later:

Easy STEM activities for toddlers and preschool kids can be done indoors on a rainy spring day! This Easter Egg Roll game will work so many skills for your toddler or older preschooler!