The most wonderful egg in the world - Book

During our day of hen themed activities we read "The most wonderful egg in the world" written and illustrated by Helme Heine.

This is a story of three hens who want to become princesses. The king suggests that whoever lays the most wonderful egg will be crowned princess. The first lays a perfect egg, the second a huge egg

and the third....a colourful cube shaped egg! The king can not decide,

because they are all wonderful in their own way....and all the hens become princesses!

We have read this book so many time, so Henry knows the story off by heart. However we read it again, and then I suggested that Henry, Kevin and I all went to a different table and drew what we considered to be the most wonderful egg in the world.

Kevin got out the scissors and created an egg mobile! I created a colourful Easter egg. Henry got to work with his favourite colour - red and drew a rectangle red egg! Then labelled it.

We discussed how he would describe his egg - rectangle, red, sharp edges. He then described my egg in various ways.....even I was at a loss how to describe daddy's egg!

Henry does Hens!

At Christmas we became the proud owners of two brown hens - Henry took delivery of them on Xmas day from Santa! Named Henrietta and Peck Peck, they have become integral members of our family! As I write this blog however, I am recovering from finding one of said hens in the middle of the road near our house after she decided a re enactment of "chicken run" would be fun! Luckily I found her, caught her & delivered her back safely!

With a number of snow days in the last couple of weeks, I dedicated one day to lots

of activities with a "

hen" theme. I'll try & outline them all here, but in summary we had:

1. Create a piece of hen related art (painting, collage, drawing etc)
2. Words rhyming with "egg" and "hen" - thought of and written down by Henry.
3. Read some hen related stories (see another post).
4. Sight words bingo (with an egg theme)
5. Simple addition of how many eggs have the two hens layed!
6. Provide an egg shape and suggest that it be turned into a person/animal etc.
7. Create a story about Henry and his hens in simple words and read it.

I apologise for the long post, but we did quite a few activities!

1. Hen art

Henry's piece of hen art was a collage using tissue paper cut up and scrunched up. I drew the outline of the Hen, and provided the

squares of cut tissue paper. I did originally offer this in gold, orange and yellow, thinking Henry would use all colours for a multi coloured hen.....however he

stuck with gold and I cut adequate bits for him to finish in that colour. Peck Peck the collage hen was a great success!

2. Rhyming words

On the internet you can find images of

anything you want. A search for "eggs" brought me a great egg picture which I replicated loads of

times. For the rhyming words, Henry had the egg shapes to write each letter on to create the rhyming words.

3. Hen & egg stories

We have on our shelf - Coriander the contrary hen and The most wonderful egg in the world, which we read. We also did an activity with the latter title which I will post as a separate activity.

4. Simple words egg bingo

For Egg bingo I printed a page with 8 eggs on, and onto each of these eggs I wrote one of Henry's sight words. I then printed out a further 8 eggs that I cut out and wrote the same words on. I replicated each of these so I could play with Henry. We took it in turns to take eggs off the pile and read the words then cover the eggs. It was a bit more fun that simple squares with words in.

5.Egg addition eggsercise!

I found a picture of a hen on the internet & printed it out twice. I then printed about 10 eggs out. Under each hen I placed a number of eggs and we did simple addition with Henry recording the number of eggs layed next to a picture of his hen run.

6. Egg head

I provided Henry with a blank piece of paper and a cut out of an egg, and suggested he turn it into a face. I imagined he would add some hair, eyes, nose and mouth......I was wrong - he actually turned it into an egg person! Then when asked to name it...called it Henry Egg!

7. A story about Henry and his hens

This I prepared in advance. I created simple sentences that Henry knew the words or could sound out the words with some help. I then added a few images to help with the story recognition. Henry thought this was great, that he appeared in the story with his hens!

Name that sign!

This little project was a bit of fun, though it made me realise how much Henry actually knew about signs!

First I used by creativity to draw a few signs, and Henry identified each....amazingly he knew them all (not helped by my artistic skills)!

Then I asked Henry to draw me a sign warning about anything he wanted.....he came up with a tree across the road, which he drew and labelled for me.

I then suggested he did another. Very into his hens and the moment, he created a sign to warn that one of his hens was about - I might just have to stick that one to the back door to remind me!

This occupied us for about 15 minutes, but got him involved in being creative and imaginative, writing, sounding his letters and discussion.

Smarties maths

Ever looking for hands on ways to make maths fun, Henry has just found that working with chocolate smarties is GREAT! We did a few things within this little project.

1. We estimated by looking in the bowl of smarties, which colour would have the most smarties, and drew the colours along the bottom of the chart in the order we though before we started graphing.

2. Henry picked out each colour and sorted the right

smarties out of the bowl, then lined them up on the graph to create a smarties bar graph.

3. Henry then counted the number of smarties of each colour and recorded this on another piece of paper.

4. The favourite bit I think for Henry was then eating all the smarties!

5. Lastly I got Henry to draw the smarties on the graph according to the numbers he recorded.

We were at this for about 50 minutes! Never once did Henry wander off!...I think it was the promise of the smarties!

A farm park trip out

During school half term we ventured out in the rain to our local farm park - Cotswold Farm park it is a fantastic place about an hours drive from where we live. The weather certainly kept most visitors at home, so we nearly had the place to ourselves. Henry and i went with one of his friends from school.

Henry loves animals, and so the touch and

cuddle area was a BIG hit!

Henry started with a very fluffy bunny....then moved onto a very small yellow cheeping chick!

He thendecided that the pen full of ducks looked like they needed some loving, so he asked if he could hold one. Judging by the assistant's response it was obviously not a regular request! But she managed to catch a very large duckling/small duck......and Henry loved it. Fascinated by its webbed feet and the fact it had small claws on the webs.

During the rest of our trip Henry fed a VERY LARGE lamb by bottle! Chased piglets,fed goats and drove electric tractors for about an hour! We also checked out the nature trail in the wood, and took a trip round the farm by tractor and trailer.

Altogether, a FANTASTIC day out!

A garden on a plate

This is one from my childhood! Making a garden on a plate. With a little imagination Henry created a little garden on a tray.

I placed some soil in the bottom, about half an inch deep, so that anything i poked into it would stand up. If you compact the soil this may work even better.

I made Henry a little silver foil pond for him to put where he wanted.

We wandered around the garden and looked for things to use. We chose Rosemary for spiky trees, i had some bits of bush with red berri

es on that became apple trees, and small path pebbles for stepping stones and wall. We broke some twigs up to create a fence, and even bent a piece of flt twig into a bench! Henry decided some moss he found on logs in our log pile would be great as grass.

This wasn't something that Henry could do on his own yet, but with my help we hung out in the garden for half an hours exploring and fresh air.

His finish project - a cute garden with pond, stone walls and fences (like our garden) a bench by the pond, apple trees in an orchard surrounded by mossy grass so that the apples wouldn't get damaged when the fell off the trees! GREAT IMAGINATION. A final fun thing, i let him fill the pond up with water, which tested his accuracy and concentration considerably!

Better late than never!

Some more photos on our move back to the UK

I so meant to post this....well about 4 months ago now - where does the time go!

After 4 weeks in a container, our furniture arrived into Felixtowe in the UK. We didn't actually see it arrive, but Henry and i took a trip down to see where it did. He was amazed at the size of the cranes and all the ships and tug boats.

We moved back into our

house in August, and those of you familiar with American sized trucks....how well they fit American sized roads! Well we had the biggest lorry arrived to deliver our furniture - but our village has TINY roads...enjoy the photos of the fun the drivers had!

This was the lorry turning to go back the way it came as there are weight restrictions out of our village in all directions except 1!

Oh yea, and in this picture you can just about see our little house behind the huge lorry! The house is actually 3 stories high!