Eggs

Happy Easter!  This week's bookworm fun was all about eggs.  My very favorite egg book in the whole world is Chickens Aren't The Only Ones, a great science book on oviparous animals complete with fun rhymes and illustrations.  Keeping with the science theme, Guess What is Growing Inside This Egg has nice actual-size egg comparisons.

The classic Horton Hatches the Egg comes with a subtle moral about responsibility, and The Egg meets all the needs of young fantasy lovers.  All in all, the selection of egg books isn't too bad once you eliminate the fluffy Easter bunny ones.

One fun activity we did this week came from my mom-- she picked up a kit at a museum gift shop.  It's called "Hatch'em" and has a mystery dinosaur inside an egg.  Put the egg in water and the dinosaur begins to "grow," cracking its egg and eventually (sometimes with the help of little fingers) emerging.

Ours was a stegosaurus.

I found a cool sensory table activity in an older book at the library, 2s Experience: Sensory Play.  You fill plastic Easter eggs with colored water (using food coloring).  I filled each half separately and froze them, then added a little water before closing the egg, in an attempt to make the two halves stick together.  This worked pretty well.

Then we brought the plastic eggs out to the water table and talked about how cold they felt.  I used warm water in the table so the ice eventually popped out of the eggs, coloring the water and giving the kids something interesting to feel.  We also talked a little about the way the colors blended.  It was a success, and next time I might do a few more eggs.

Of course we dyed some boiled eggs-- how can you not.  To some we added stickers, and on others we used white crayon for resistance art.  I like the way that turned out.

The other art project this week was to decorate eggs with crayons, markers, fingerpaints, etc.  I picked up a pack of cardboard eggs at Michaels, and T also drew and cut some out himself.

I would have loved to make a paper mache Easter Egg (using a balloon and newspaper) and cut it in half to make a unique type of Easter basket, but we ran out of time.  A friend of mine did that one year and it was fabulous.


We recited Humpty Dumpty this week, and here is one nice fingerplay for eggs:

Ten Fluffy Chickens

Five eggs and five eggs
that makes ten
(hold up ten fingers)
Sitting on top is Mother Hen
(place one hand on top of the other)
Cackle, cackle, cackle
(clap three times)
What do I see?
Ten fluffy chickens,
(hold up ten fingers)
As yellow as can be

Want to watch a bald eagle hatch?  Check out the eagle cam.  My kids were thrilled by this.

Still hungry for more egg fun?  Check out The Best Kids Books.  Also, make your own cascarones like they did at Nirvana Homeschooling. Happy Easter, and come back next week!