Crack open an Egg

Somehow I have gotten behind in my posting - again.  So, I will keep myself on track by posting this week's story time now and hopefully getting last week's up soon.  With the Easter Bunny coming this weekend we did an Egg theme for story time.  I really didn't do much that was Easter-y, we focused more on the egg aspect.  Our letter of the day was E (for the second time this session much to the joy of a few children who have E names) and our word was Egg.  A few even remembered our elephants from a few weeks ago when I asked what words start with the letter E.  They also came up with eggs rather quickly.

We talked for a minute about what hatches from eggs.  They knew a few like chickens, ducks, birds, and dinosaurs.  I added alligators, turtles, spiders, caterpillars, snakes, and dragons - just like Sparky!

That little discussion led well to our first book which was The cow that laid an egg by Andy Cutbill.  This is a fun book about an ordinary cow (ordinary in the fact that she cannot do fabulous tricks like the handstands the other cows do) who appears to lay an egg.  There is much speculation among the other cows about who really laid the egg (the chickens are prime suspects).  So, they all wait eagerly to see what will come out of the egg.  This one has a cute, semi-surprise ending that the kids enjoyed.

Our second book was Emily Gravett's The odd egg.  In this story all the birds have laid eggs, except for duck - who happens to be a boy and thus making egg laying rather impossible.  (This fact is not mentioned in the story and could make for good discussion, though I did not address it with the 2's and 3's.)  But, duck finds an egg, so he has one of his own.  When all of the other eggs hatch with babies that look like the mothers, his remains unhatched.  Until, one day, a surprise pops out.  This was another surprise ending that they seemed to enjoy.

We ended with a flannel board that I made to go along with the theme.  Basically I had 11 craft foam eggs, each with something different hidden underneath.  We were in search of a small chick that was hidden under one egg.  I pulled each egg off and the kids would shout out what they saw.  We found a carrot, a chocolate bunny, jellybeans, a dinosaur, and even an Angry Bird before we got to the chick.

This was a busy week for our egg shakers.  We sang the Shaker hop by Carole Peterson.  This is much like the Bunny hop, but instead you put your shakers in and out and then dance around. 

Laurie Berkner's I know a chicken is always great for an egg theme.  She knows a chicken who laid a shaky egg, so we shake our eggs around.  The kids really like the parts where they get to shake the eggs fast.  This song can get a little long, but you can always stop it early.

We also sang the Wiggles version of Shake your sillies out.  I let my Tuesday night group use shaker eggs with this one as it is a small group and they were able to sit quietly with the shakers during the second story.  With the other groups I collected the eggs between the other two songs and we just sang this one with no shakers.

Our craft this week was an Easter grass egg that I found here at CraftyNoodle.  I failed to notice that they used paper grass and instead bought the plastic kind which did not work well with the glue stick you are instructed to use.  However, I found that Elmer's glue did the trick and we ended up with some nice looking eggs anyway.