Jelly Bean Activities to Keep the Kids Busy

These jelly bean activities are so easy and fun to do with the kids on a spring day! Take a bag of jelly beans and a few other supplies and you can do these too!

My kids love doing things or creating so I thought it would be fun to see what all we can do with jelly beans for spring. Jelly beans are everywhere for Easter and my kids don’t necessarily love to eat them so we decided to do some fun jelly bean activities with them. Since they are so colorful and a good shape there are tons of ways you can have some fun.

Sorting Jelly Beans

This is great for your youngest kids. It will help work on categories, colors, and patterns. Give them the bag and let them sort them into groups. If you had super littles you might have colors of paper or circles down for your little to help find a match. To add an extension for older kids you can even have them add the jelly beans by color and make some addition facts. There are several ways you can extend these small mini-lessons to make them meaningful and fun too! My youngest is in kinder so he’s all about writing his own addition facts problems.

Jelly Bean Structures

For this jelly bean activity, you’ll need jelly beans and toothpicks. (Tell them to be careful as the jellybeans can be a little hard and toothpicks can be sharp!!) My kids loved doing this and got creative with their structures. My 11 year old even liked it. She built a larger structure and then my 5-year-old had to build something similar. He learned too because his kept falling over because he didn’t have the best support on the bottom. It was really neat!

Jelly Bean Color Experiment

I wasn’t sure if this would really work but it totally did! This is just like the skittles experiment you’ve been seeing around that also works great. You place the jelly beans in one layer around a white dish in all colors and then add water in the middle. In a few seconds, the color starts to carry to the middle and form a fun rainbow of colors. The kids loved it. It’s a super fast experiment that would is would be fun to do with preschool aged kids too.

Jelly Bean Paint

Since the color wore off the jelly beans pretty well we thought we’d try making or own watercolor paint. We put the sorted jelly beans from the above activity in some water and let the color drain off for a few hours. The kids loved checking in on the beans to see how it was coming along. Then we were able to use the colors to paint with! This was perfect on a rainy Saturday morning. I popped some lids on the containers and saved them for when we had time. It worked but it was pretty watery.

Here’s a fun Easter Snack Idea that the kids will love for you to make and serve them in the plastic eggs! Check out all the details.