Craft Exchange

Peter Cottontail Game

Choose from a beautiful color version to print and play from, or a black and white version that you can color. You can use the printable characters or use jelly beans as your markers.

This project is rated EASY to do.

What You Need

Printable game board and playing pieces (below)

Printer and paper

Crayons or colored pencils

Cardboard

Con-Tact paper, optional

Scissors

Glue

Craft foam sheets or construction paper in yellow, light blue, light green, and lavender

Container to draw playing pieces from (paper bag, bowl or basket)

How To Make It

Choose to print in either black and white, full color, or color the eggs (on color game board):
Choose one of the following to print:
Full Color Game
Color with blank Eggs
B&W Game
Color your own board: If you are going to use the colors of the eggs to determine moves, color the eggs in a repeating pattern of light blue, yellow, purple, light green. Make the last egg multicolored with all 4 colors. Read the variations below to determine if the color of the eggs will matter.... if it doesn't, you can just let the kids go wild decorating.
You can make your game board sturdier by mounting it to cardboard using glue spread very thinly across the cardboard. Cover the front (back optional) with Con-Tact paper.
Cut the playing pieces out as directed on the printout.
Color in the playing pieces if you printed out the page in black and white.
Cut egg shaped pieces out of craft foam or construction paper in the different colors.

How to play:
Here are some ideas for how to play. Young children can play this as a color matching game. Older kids can practice math or reading. You can make up almost anything to go on the eggs, below are some ideas.

You will need to have a small paper bag for them to pull eggs out of, or a small basket to dump the eggs out of, depending on which way you play.

Match the color
Cut out egg shapes from the 4 colors of foam or construction paper (or color white paper eggs to match). Put them into a small paper bag, have the child reach in without peeking to pull out an egg, and then move to that color on the board.

Easy adding:
Make a small Easter basket as a shaker. Take 2 eggs, and put numbers on each side of the egg - 0 and 1 on one egg, 2 and 3 on the other. Put them into the small Easter basket, then dump them out and add up the numbers to see how far to move.

Harder adding:
Make one more egg, with the numbers 1 and 2 on it and see how far you can go now!

Play the even/odd game:
Put 1 even number and 1 odd number on each side of two eggs. Dump the eggs from a small basket, and add the numbers up. Move 2 spaces forward if you get an even number, 1 space forward if you get an odd number. The great thing about this game is that you can use larger numbers on the eggs for them to add before moving... Just be sure that each egg (you can also use more than 2 eggs) has 1 even number and 1 odd number on the egg. You could even put math problems on the eggs (remember to have an equal number of even and odd answers) for them to solve, like 2+3 or 2x3.... and once they solve it, they have to say if it's even or odd... or if you use colored eggs, they can just go to that color on the board if they get the math problem right.

Other variations:
The sky is the limit - you could put letters on the eggs, capital letters move 2 spaces, lowercase letters move 1. Or consonants move 2 spaces, vowels move 4 spaces... you could put words on the eggs, and the child has to read the word and then move the number of spaces based on the number of letters in the word... or move to that color on the board if they can read the word, or if they can spell the word without looking at it. Anything that will allow them to move 1-5 spaces per move will result in a fun game that will not last too long.

This project was contributed by:
Grace Sylvan

Characters copyright Golden Books

More Samples - Back to Home