The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett (2009)

    This wonderfully engaging book creates fine opportunities for dialogic reading and discussing interesting vocabulary and concepts. The discussions begin with the cover.

    "What does odd mean?" (Most preschoolers don’t know, so we talk about what the word odd means.)

    "What's odd about this egg?"  (It has spots, the spots are green, it's really big!)

We talk about the other birds (besides duck) in the story:

    "How are the other birds treating duck?" (being mean)

    "What kinds of birds are here?"

The children can also predict which bird will hatch out of each egg.

    Because of the cut pages in the hatching section of the book, a couple of children have asked if the book is ripped, so we talk about the relationship between the different sizes of pages and the different sizes of eggs (i.e. the smallest egg has the smallest page, etc.) and we talk about that being an idea that the artist had when she was making the book.

    And of course the punch lines are funny, especially the crocodile calling duck Mama at the end.

Love this book! It's a hit!

- Barbara Head