Activities for The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth

The Enormous Egg is a fun book to read, and is a favorite at our house. I decided to use it in third grade and since I couldn't find a lapbook or other types of activities to go with the book I made up my own.

Chapter 1

• We looked in the atlas and found Freedom, New Hampshire.
• I printed out a map of New England and K. marked Freedom on it.
• We found a picture of a New Hampshire Red rooster and printed it.

Chapter 2

• Added Laconia and Boston to our map
• Started writing out the plot of the story. This was a sheet I printed out from the Young Novelist Workbook. It has a drawing of a roller coaster with nine blocks of space to write the plot -- beginning, as the action build, the climax, the falling action, and the conclusion.

Chapter 3

• Printed out a labeled diagram of a rowboat so we could find out what the gunwale and oarlocks were.

Chapter 4

• Added to the plot work sheet.

Chapter 5

• Found definitions of archaeology and paleontology and completed a Venn diagram about them.

Chapter 6

• Learned more about what animals have gizzards.
• Printed out a picture of a skeleton of a triceratops.
• K. wrote some sentences on the paper about gizzards.
• Made a chart comparing K.'s size and my size. We used ribbon to measure our nose, hand, ear, foot, etc. and taped them on a poster to see how big K. is and how much she has to grow.

Chapter 7

• Added to plot work sheet.
• Added Washington D.C. / National Museum to map

Chapter 8

• Vocabulary word: dubious
• Gladiolus; we printed out a picture and found out that some words' plural form ends in 'i' because they are Latin words.

Chapter 9

• Added to plot work sheet

Chapter 10

• Added to plot work sheet

Chapter 11

• Found a diagram of a window with sash weights.
• Set up an experiment with two buckets - one representing the window and the other the sash weight. I tied them together with string and hung it over the back of a chair. K. discovered that if the weight was heavier than the window, the window wouldn't stay closed, and if the window was heavier than the weight, the window wouldn't stay open.
• Added to plot work sheet

Chapter 12

• We traced their trip from Freedom to Washington D.C. in the atlas.

Chapter 13

• Used a map of Washington D.C. to follow the story.

Chapter 14

• Added to plot work sheet
• Found the National Zoological Park on the map.

Chapter 15

• Found fallacies in Senator Granderson's speech.
• Added to plot work sheet

Chapter 16

• Added to plot work sheet

Chapter 17

• Finished plot work sheet

There are lots of other things you could do, such as find out how a bill becomes a law or how a senator is elected, depending on what you are interested in.