Learning about eggs around Easter just makes sense when you teach at a church-affiliated preschool but you don’t have to celebrate Easter in your class to use these great preschool lessons about eggs for some wonderful learning! I love teaching about eggs and baby animals because young children relate to both easily through prior experience and knowledge. It’s also a wonderful start to learning about animal classification – we know some animals hatch from eggs and others don’t. Great let’s learn about different kinds of animals and ways that they are similar and ways they are different. We can even start using the proper names, mammals, reptiles, fish, birds… See how easy this can be to bring down big concepts to the just right level for preschool and pre-k? It’s a cinch! Let’s check out the activities we use for learning about eggs at preschool.
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Preschool and PreK Circle Time Lessons About Eggs
What Do Egg Shells Do?
I love using questions at the start of lessons and then from there learning more about the answer together with all kinds of activities. For this lesson, I asked what do egg shells do and these were the answers I got from my PreK students. We followed it up by reading this wonderful book about the life cycle of chickens.
After reading Where do chicks come from? together we also decided to do the classic rubber egg experiment. We put one egg in vinegar in a jar, and one egg in water in a jar and then observed what happened over the next many days. We kept the jars in the fridge and took them out only to observe. We talked about how the strong shell protects the egg inside while the hen sits on the egg before it hatches but that some things can dissolve the shell, like vinegar!
After a week we compared the two eggs – and I very carefully showed my students how the one with the shell in the water was still able to protect the egg inside when I squeezed, but the other one broke easily.
What Hatches From Eggs?
I love this simple little circle time activity. Most of my PreK students know which animals come from eggs and which don’t but sometimes there are a few tricky ones like penguins! While doing this sorting activity if the children have the bandwidth for more information talk about the differences between classes of animals; mamals, reptiles, fish, amphibians, and birds. Now don’t get stuck in the weeds – yes technically there are 3 different classes of fish but this is ECE we are introducing general concepts let’s keep it simple!
You can start this lesson with Egg by Kevin Henkes, it’s a simple book that will allow a lot of time for this activity, but get to the heart of this lesson, that birds aren’t the only things that hatch from eggs!
I use a printable I made for this lesson – it has 18 animals on it. Download it for free here!
Give each child an animal and invite them to think hard to decide if an animal hatches from an egg or not. I usually take this time to encourage my students to use their prior knowledge about animals and eggs. Maybe they have pets who lay eggs, or have seen a pet give birth? Maybe they have had a bird’s nest in their yard before. This is the time to chat about this briefly and practice using prior knowledge to think critically about a new task.
Now sort!
Do White Eggs and Brown Eggs Taste The Same?
If you can do food-related activities in your class I love being able to do this! It’s a simple lesson that helps you teach the basic scientific process. Observing a difference, asking a question about that difference, designing an experiment to answer that question, and using that data for an answer. All you need is a few white and a few brown eggs, hardboil them before the lesson. If you want, you can have your students peel the hardboiled eggs at free choice, it’s great fine motor work!
After asking this question, ask your students how we could find out for sure. They will say taste both; “Yes, that’s right! ”
Now taste each and decide … do they taste the same or different? There is no wrong answer, it’s an experiment!
Follow this activity up with this wonderful book Eggs from Red Hen Farm by Monica Wellington.
Egg-Themed Activities for learning about eggs at preschool
Crack & Write – this activity uses discovery as a fantastic novelty. Children open the eggs and write the letter, or number on the whiteboard.
Explore nests at the science table.
Explore bird watching INSIDE with this simple discovery bottle activity.
Play Exercise eggs as a fun and active whole group lesson!
Use an eggshell writing tray to practice letter formation!
And of course a classic egg drop activity too!
For even more Easter Egg themed activities check out our archive of great ideas!
