What My Child Is Reading – Egg Books

With the new kindergarten schedule Anna doesn’t have as much time for reading as before. It doesn’t seem that she reads a lot in her afterschool program. Perhaps she does, but she doesn’t share much of what she reads. During our traditional read-together times in the evening I was continuing to read her Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and she was reading various egg-themed books to me.

An Extraordinary Egg by Leo Lionni was Anna’s reading assignment for a week. We read this book before, and since it has no conflict and very little danger it was well received. In fact the book is quite funny, and has distinctive illustrations of Lio Lionni. I think younger children will especially delight in the absurdity of seeing a picture of an alligator and hearing the word “chicken” instead. Since it was a funny egg book, I decided to stretch myself and look for other funny egg books to read this week.

We read Eggday by Joyce Dunbar when Anna was about 3, and I decided to get this book again, because I remembered it as being quite funny too. In this book a horse, a pig and a goat are challenged by a duck to “the best egg contest”. They all try (unsuccessfully) to lay an egg, but get help from someone who does lay eggs. The book also gently introduces proper vocabulary (mare, foal, billy goat, kid, etc.). Illustrations are very bright – every time I look at them, I go, Hmm… I wonder how she did it. A good read for 2+, but unlikely to be interesting for someone beyond the 1st grade.

We haven’t found a book by Tad Hills yet that we didn’t like. Duck & Goose is another one that we read before, but I brought it back to continue the theme of silly books about eggs, including “pretend” eggs. Writing about it made me realize that all three books shared have one thing in common – an author is also an illustrator. Same applies to The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett. This is going to be a fun exercise for tomorrow – to see if Anna picks this up in “the same and different” game.

As always, we also read a non-fiction book, An Egg Is Quiet by Dianna Hutts Aston, illustrated by Silvia Long. The strength of this book is definitely in format and in an incredible level of detail for illustrations. By the way, this is part of the series – you can find other books in the series by doing an Amazon search on the author. Anna enjoyed the book, but she is not really into animal classification at the moment. This book, however, can be used for older kids as well while studying birds or lifecycles.