Eggs

One of our favorite nonfiction paperback books is Chickens Aren't the Only Ones. "Oviparous" is such a fun word to say. So, I decided to base a day's worth of activities off of that theme. We started out reading that book and some others. Then, since it is a Reading Rainbow book, we watched the corresponding episode (and I got some serious flashbacks to my childhood). We also read Animals Born Alive and Well, from the same author, to get information on the opposite of oviparous: viviparous. We talked about monotremes, those strange mammals that straddle both worlds. 

Books

• The Golden Egg Book by Margaret Wise Brown
• Big Egg by Molly Coxe
• The Egg (A First Discovery Book) by Gallimard Jeunesse and Pascale de Bourgoing
• Olli/Ollie by Olivier Dunrea
• Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey
• Chickens Aren't the Only Ones by Ruth Heller
• Animals Born Alive and Well by Ruth Heller

Activities

• Experiment: Shell-less Egg. Put an egg in a glass of vinegar, and let sit for a few hours. The shell will be eaten away by the vinegar, leaving the innards of the egg encased in the membrane. You can see right through it, and you can even bounce it gently. 

• Specimen examination: Ray egg sac (mermaid's purse), dinosaur eggshell fossil, empty praying mantis egg cases (including one that was cut in half and put in a test tube, to see what the inside looks like). 

• Craft: Paper and Sticker nest. We shredded some colorful construction paper and used a glue stick to make nests. Then we used sticker eggs in the center. Evie went a bit further and added some chicks. And flowers. And stars. 

• Activity: egg hunt. Who says you can only do this on Easter? I rounded up some plastic eggs, put one M&M in each, and hid them around her playroom. Then I unleashed her with a basket. The last one that she found was hidden in the dollhouse. 

• Pretend play: build nest out of stuffed animals, take care of plastic eggs. We gathered as many stuffed animals as we could, and formed them in a circle on the play mat. Then we took the plastic eggs from the egg hunt and put them in the center. Evie "laid" them, sat on them, rotated them, and hatched them, then fed her chicks. 

• Experiment: Crack an egg in a bag. Put an egg in a Ziplock bag, and then let your kid drop it on the floor! The mess is contained in the bag, and the toddler can squish it around all they want. PS: the photo to the right also shows the egg in vinegar, as bits of the shell float to the surface. 

• Activity: Oviparous vs Viviparous sorting sheet. Draw a line down the center of a piece of paper. Write an "O" on one half, and a "V" on the other. Then get a sticker sheet of animals, and have toddler sort them out.