Letter E is for Egg

Last week we did letter E and focused mostly on eggs. This week was a bit different than other letters we've done, because we we pretty heavily focused on science, and didn't have as many art projects as usual. But we still had a good time.

We used three awesome books to tie our theme together. And I will highly recommend all three of them. First, a favorite at our house, Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.

Second, a new favorite that I hadn't read before, but I will highly recommend it: Chickens Aren't the Only Ones by Ruth Heller. It's mostly in rhyme, and has lots of colorful pictures. It starts with a chicken but as you continue to read you find out that chickens aren't the only animals who lay eggs...all birds do too. But birds aren't the only ones either, reptiles and amphibians lay eggs too. And then onto fish and insects, and there are even a few mammals that lay eggs too. Anyways, I thought it was a fantastic book, and I will definitely check out the other books in her World of Nature series.

And third, after we learned all about the different kinds of animals that can lay eggs, we read this fun guessing book called Guess What is Growing Inside This Egg by Mia Posada. The kids really like this one too, because it's a guessing game. The first page shows a picture of an egg up close, with a little bit of the animal who laid it's habitat, and the text gives you some clues, and you have to guess what's inside the egg. Then the next page gives the answer and some great facts about the animal.

Our activities were fun too. Throughout the week we tried eggs cooked in different ways. Scrambled, boiled, sunny-side-up, in a sandwich. It was fun, but I forgot to take any pictures.

Of course we did our Letter E craft. The E is supposed to be a chick hatching out of it's egg. The kids enjoyed adding the feathers. This is probably not my favorite letter craft, but it gets the job done. :)

To go along with our reading of Chickens Aren't the Only Ones, I gave the kids a paper divided into 4 sections and told them to pick 4 animals other than a chicken that lays eggs, and draw one in each square. I ended up drawing some on Ivan's while he drew some and colored some, and Linc was on his own. They had fun flipping through the pages of our books to find the animals they wanted to draw and to see what their eggs looked like.

And to top things off, Daddy came up with a couple fun "egg"speriments to do. Experiment number 1 was to take a raw egg, a boiled egg, and a raw egg covered in tooth paste and put them each into a glass and cover them with vinegar. We're still observing to see what's going to happen, but supposedly, the vinegar is going to eat away the shells of the first two eggs, and we'll be able to see what an egg looks like without it's shell. The third egg, the one covered in tooth paste, is supposed to be protected by the fluoride in the toothpaste and not lose it's shell. If it works, I'll be sure to insert a plug for brushing your teeth! :) Read more about this experiment here.

The second experiment was to create a vacuum that would suck a peeled boiled egg through a small opening in a vase. Ours sort of worked, but we determined that the bottom of our vase wasn't wide enough, and didn't allow the oxygen to stay in long enough to really suck the eggs all the way down to the bottom of the vase. But it did work a little bit. Enough for the kids to be impressed. (The kids are mostly impressed with anything Aaron does.) Read more about this experiment here.

For more E ideas that we didn't get to, check out my Pinterest board. This week we're taking a break from the alphabet and instead learning about Columbus Day and Fall!