Eggs

 

Opening Song: “I Am Here & You Are Here” by Peter & Ellen Allard (on Sing It! Say It! Stamp It! Sway It! Vol. 3)

Story: Eggs 1 2 3: Who Will the Babies Be? by Janet Halfmann.  Because I always start with a guessing book, if at all possible.  This one is fun, because it covers a wide variety of things that come out of eggs – robins, fish, tadpoles, penguins, snakes, platypuses (platypi?), caterpillars, glow worms, turtles, and ostriches.  It also teaches the names of the babies, which is fun; who knew that a baby platypus is called a puggle?  Does it get any cuter than that?  It’s also a counting book, which at least one of my little guys found fascinating.  There was a lot of child chatter during this book, but it was interested child chatter as opposed to disengaged child chatter, so it was all good.

Song: “Little Chick”  I have done this before as little mouse / what color house, but I saw this idea on Miss Mary Liberry and thought it would be fun.  This is actually the third flannel story (ok, this one’s a song) I’ve made in two weeks, and I hardly ever do flannels.  Total madness, right?  I made eight different colored eggs and, as Miss Mary suggested, I made several different animals that could could come out of eggs.  Basically, everything we had a die for that would fit into the egg – a yellow chick, but also a brown duck, green frog, orange fish, and red parrot.  We looked for the yellow chick until we found it, and then I gave them other things to search for.  Every egg had something underneath.  We kept going until they were all uncovered.  It was too big a group for me to let the kids uncover the eggs, but I did call on kids to choose the color.

Story: Peepsqueak! by Leslie Ann Clark.  This one was fun, especially with all of the kids repeating “He was on the move!” with me.  I was glad this one had some farm animals in it.  The glory of the animal sound is that when you moo, you get them all back for a little while.

Song:  “I Know a Chicken” from Laurie Berkner’s Whaddaya Think of That?  Hand out shakey eggs and sing (without CD).  The adults were super-helpful in doing the responsive singing with me, which was nice.  One little dude came up to give me back his eggs near the beginning of the song, and then they all wanted to give them back!  I had to keep telling them to hang onto their eggs until the end of the song.

Story: Except If by Jim Averbeck.  The kids were all really attentive for this – it’s so much fun to see how things change in unexpected ways throughout the story – but I had so many chatty adults that I actually had to stop and shush them.  My adults were kind of wild in Babytime this morning, too – crazy!  I wonder how long I can keep blaming things on the weather?

Ending Song: “See You Later”

 

Craft: Decorate an egg.  I stole this idea.  Start with a plain white cardstock egg.  Use a few pieces of masking tape to make lines.  Decorate with wet chalk.  Peel up tape lines.  I know they look Easter egg-y, and this is not an Easter storytime, but – they’re so cute!  (One mom with 2-year-old twins told me she was glad we did this because they hadn’t decorated any Easter eggs at home and she was feeling guilty.)  The kids had fun with them.  Some left the tape on, and some colored without any tape at all.  Two kids made striped eggs, which was a very nice effect.  We had these very vibrant chalks on hand, which made the resulting eggs extra cool.  I tried to mitigate the Easter effect by asking the kids what was going to hatch out of their eggs.

 

Other possible titles:

Paddle Perch Climb: Bird Feet Are Neat by Laurie Ellen Angus  (if focus is birds, not just eggs)

 

 

“Little Chick”
(to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle”)

Little chick, little chick,
Come out to play.
What color egg
Are you in today?