Mia Posada is a fantastic author and illustrator of children’s literature. She has won many awards for her work, such as the National Science Teachers Association Award, Children’s Book Council Award, and the Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students k-12 Selector’s Choice Award. She truly has a gift and a outstanding passion for children’s literature.
Guess What Is Growing Inside This Egg starts off my giving you visual and conceptual clues on what type of eyes are being shown. This can give you, the teacher, the opportunity to ask your students to guess and explore what exact animal the book is talking about.
Their mother crawled from sea to land
To bury these soft eggs in the sand.
Can you guess what is
growing inside these eggs.
As you can see the book is laid out by using rhyming words, which makes it fun for the children to read. It also allows us to continuously work on phonics with the children and having a fun rhyme to is a different twist to a book’s layout. Also, throughout the book you will notice that once it tells you what type of animal egg they were describing, it goes on to talk about that animal and its life. As a teacher you can read this to your students and use the facts as a learning tool and/or you can use this book as a fun exploration activity to spice up a lesson plan. Teachers would/should be able to find many options and activities to explore the concepts of this book. At the end we get to see the actual size of the eggs for each animal that was talked about in the book. I find this to be a great summary to an interesting book. You may want to allow students to pass this around or have an actual sheet for them to compare and contrast the different egg sizes we just read about, in order to make the activities hands-on with your class.
Curriculum Connections
This book would be a wonderful asset to a lesson on life science with grades 1st-3rd. In the Virginia SOL 1.5, 2.5 and 3.4 students will investigate and understand that animals including people have life needs and physical characteristics. Guess What Is Growing Inside This Egg allows students to guess different animal eggs and their characteristics. By allowing students to guess which animals are in the pictures will allow them to use their imaginations and explore the physical characteristics of different animals and their eggs.
Additional Resources
- Color Color Color – If you incorporated this book into the first grade classroom it would be really interesting to print pictures of a bunch of different animals from different environments. Then, allow the children to pick the different pictures they would like to color and make our own animal home. For example, you would print off 5 Alligators, 5 ducks, 5 penguins, and 5 octopus pictures!
- CyberSleuth gives us many different lesson plans for animal life cycles and characteristics. Its always nice to get ideas from different teachers who have been successful teaching the same subjects.
Book: Guess What Is Growing Inside This Egg
Author/Illustrator: Mia Posada
Publisher: Millbrook Press
Publication Date: 2007
Pages: 28 pages
Grades: 1-3
ISBN: 0822561921