Colorful Cardboard Easter Egg Craft

Last Updated on April 24, 2026 by Sheryl Cooper

Inside: Toddlers and preschoolers love this cardboard Easter egg craft. Using tinted glue and tissue paper circles make these cardboard eggs colorful and festive!

Looking for a super easy art activity for Easter? This is the one!

Grab some cardboard and a few other pieces and invite your toddlers and preschoolers to get creative.

Let me show you how!

colorful Easter Egg craft for toddlers and preschoolers

If I can use any recycled pieces at the art table, I am all for it.

Especially cardboard!

If you’ve been following Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds for awhile, you might recall some of these favorites:

I also like using cardboard because it’s so durable. Paper can curl up if too much paint or glue is applied, but cardboard remains flat.

And that’s good, because some of my young students love to add as much as they can to their artwork and the cardboard holds up no matter what!

Colorful Cardboard Easter Egg Craft

What We Used

Cardboard, cut into ovals (you can use this free egg template if desired)
Tissue paper circles
Felt circles
White glue
Tempera paint

Adaptations: If you don’t own tissue paper and felt circles, improvise with what you already have! You can cut pieces of colorful paper, for example. You can even add pom poms, buttons, sequins, or other small pieces.

Preparation

Cut ovals from your cardboard, one for each child.
Place tissue paper circles (and/or other small pieces) in containers.
Tint your glue (see below).

How to Tint Glue

Pour small amounts of white glue into shallow containers.
Add a dollop of tempera paint to each container of glue. (I used a few different colors.)

It’s that easy! I love tinting glue because the color adds an extra amount of pop to the activity.

Note: I get a lot of questions about the white round containers shown in the picture below. They are recycled wet dog food containers that I gathered many years ago.

Creating the Cardboard Easter Egg Craft

Place everything on trays, add paintbrushes, and invite your children to create!

There aren’t many directions needed for this activity, which is why it’s a great choice for toddlers. But preschoolers have fun with it, too!

We passed around the different colors of tinted glue so that each egg had at least two colors.

This is also a great color mixing activity! When the green and blue paints were mixed, for example, green showed up.

CLICK HERE for more color mixing activities.

Then, it’s time to add the small pieces!

The benefit of adding paint to the glue is that it eliminates two steps (first painting, then gluing).

Pressing the small pieces on to the painted cardboard is also a nice fine motor activity. I am always looking for ways to strengthen those hands!

When finished, let dry!

I love how colorful they turned out.

If you’d like to hang these, you can add a loop with yarn or string to the top with some hot glue. Looking back, I wish I had done this so we could have hung them in our classroom tree.