A Good Egg

An Egg is Quiet

By Dianna Aston

Illustrated by Sylvia Long

Chronicle Books, 2006

ISBN#  0-8118-4428-5

Nonfiction picture book

 

 An Egg is Quiet uses metaphors to describe the wide variety of shapes, colors, and sizes that eggs of many animals display. Details about specific eggs are given under the true-to-life drawings. The spread of eggs at the start of the books corresponds with the closing spread of animals hatched from each egg.

 

  

An egg is quiet.
It sits there,
under its mother’s feathers…
on top of its father’s feet…
buried beneath the sand.
Warm.
Cozy.

 

 

Activity 1

Show and discuss the life cycles of the three animals on the spread, “An egg is giving.” Talk about how the process repeats itself.

 Have your students create an image of themselves as a newborn baby and draw their own life cycle through adulthood.

 

Activity 2

Use the Enchanted Learning site: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/butterfly/activities/printouts/lifecycle.shtml to trace the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly. Duplicate the page and have the students color each stage of the life cycle correctly. To save paper, put the image on an overhead transparency and have the students draw their own images of the Monarch life cycle, and then color them correctly.

 

 

 

 The teacher’s guide is excellent, particularly the simple experiments. Look for it on the Chronicle site.

 

 

 

Eggs by Marilyn Singer and Emma Stevenson also contains nice information.

 

 

National Science Standard: Life cycles of organisms