The Strange Egg
Mary Newell DePalma
Houghton Mifflin Company 2001
ISBN 0-618-09507-1
 
 
The Strange Egg is about discovery and friendship. Despite our size or experience,
each individual has something to learn, and something to share. As is the case with most picture books,
the dynamics of the text and pictures require that the students understand the visual cues
as well as the text in order to fully understand the story.
 
Pre-reading activities
Experiment:
  • Use only one of your senses to identify something.
    For example, touch some plain cooked pasta while blindfolded and guess what it is
  • List the guesses.
  • Add another sense—does it help to listen to it?
  • What do you think might help you KNOW what it is?
Read and discuss this folk tale from India:
Five blind men wanted to find out what an elephant was. They had one brought to them.
Surrounding the elephant, each blind man reached up to touch it.
The first blind man grabbed the elephant's trunk. He said, "Aha! So an elephant is like a snake."
The second blind man, holding one of the elephant's legs said, "Oh, no, it's like a tree trunk."
The third grabbed the elephant's ear and said, "How can you say that?  An elephant is clearly like a fan."
The fourth, clutching the animal's tail, said, "No, no, no! The elephant is a like a rope."
The fifth, climbing up the side of the elephant, said, "You're all wrong! The elephant resembles a small hill.”
Examine The Strange Egg book cover:
  • What is the title?
  • Is that an egg?
  • What do you think the bird thinks?
  • What do YOU think?
  • Why do you think that?
 
Science
Plant seeds
  • Water
  • Wait
  • Watch
  • Can you think of ways that eggs and seeds are similar?
 
Ask
  • What kinds of things are you curious about?
  • How will you learn more about these things?
 
List
  • Means of investigation
  • Five senses
 
Be detectives! Investigate something that the class is curious about with the scientific method:
  • Ask a question
  • Make up a hypothesis (guess what the answer is)
  • Learn more about your topic (research)
  • Experiment
  • Analyze all of your information and see if your hypothesis was correct!
 
Language
Look through The Strange Egg. See where you can find:
  • Use of past tense, words with  –ed
  • Descriptive verbs
  • Alliteration
Write descriptive sentences about something you:
  • Tasted
  • Touched
  • Smelled
  • Heard
  • Saw
Discuss the characters in The Strange Egg:
  • Why do you think the little bird sits on the egg?
  • How do you feel about the little bird?
  • Can you figure out places in the story where the little bird is a taking care of something?
  • How do you feel about the monkey when he peels the ‘egg’?
  • How do you feel about the monkey when he shares the orange?
 
Discuss concepts:
  • What do you think ‘hatching ideas’ means?
  • Figure out which character in this book takes a journey.
  • What do you think ‘journey of discovery’ means?
  • How do you think that is different than a journey to a place?
  • What do you think the monkey and the bird learn?
  • Do you think they each learn something different?
  • What are the ways that we learn what we know?
  • Do you think words and letters help us learn?
 
Art/movement/music
Examine the mood of particular illustrations in The Strange Egg.
Use of color, shape, point of view, scale, expression, etc., may communicate these moods.
  • Find a page in the book showing something scary
  • Why do you think it seems scary?
  • Find a page in the book showing something sad
  • Why do you think the picture seems sad?
  • Find a page in the book where there is a question
  • What makes you think there is a question?
  • Find a page in the book where friends are shown
  • What are the clues to let you know these are friends?
 
Examine the content of illustrations:
  • Why do you think there might be maps in the illustration?
  • Why do you think there might there be words/letters in the illustrations? (Hint: see social studies concepts)
 
Act out the story—this would make a great little play!
  • Make scenery
  • Make costumes
  • Feast on oranges!
 
Draw
  • A series of drawings of the plants you’ve grown:
    seeds, seedlings, flowering plant
  • Yourself investigating something
  • Something you saw, smelled, tasted, touched, or heard
  • Draw a picture where the color, shape, or action shows a particular mood.