New Life, New Stories: My First Day by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page

Easter has been on my mind this week and it has been on the minds of my students as well. They love talking about their plans. Skyler informed me that she is going to feed her fish, Roxie and Goldie, special Easter food. She plans to hide it, so her fish can hunt for the special treat. Olivya’s Dogs are going to get Easter eggs. She painted them at home – blue and green for Quest and pink and purple for Roxy. Olivya is going to hide the eggs for her dogs but her cat Luna will just get cat food. She scratches.

Not all kids celebrate Easter, so I steered the conversation away from the subject during many of my speech sessions and for my language groups, I read a book about new life in the animal kingdom: My First Day, by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page. 

It begins with a question,

“What did you do on your first day – the day you were born?”  

A kiwi starts off with his answer.

“On my first day, I spent hours kicking my way out of my egg. As soon as I hatched, I was ready to take care of myself.”

This charming book introduced wood ducks, sea otters, muntjacs and megapodes. I had never heard of some of the animals in the story, nor had my students. All the creatures fascinated the kids, but they were amazed when I read about Darwin’s frog.

“On my first day, I hopped out of my father’s mouth. When I was a tadpole, he kept me safe in a special pouch in this throat. But once I became a frog, it was time to be on my own.”

My students weren’t the only ones to gather new information when we read this story; many of the animal facts were new to me. At the back of the book the author provided more detailed information about the animals and their habitats.  That inspired my students to further research and so we used the Internet on my iPad and found some photographs of the animals.

All this talk of animals reminded Noah of his farm and his pig. He told us the pig made a huge nest of hay, just like a chicken nest, only bigger. Noah figures his pig learned the technique from the chickens because they live together. Nests brought the conversation back to eggs and that brought us back to Easter. His chickens, it seems, lay extra eggs on the holiday. I haven’t been to Noah’s house so I can’t say for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. After all, Easter is a time full of new life and new hope. That hope obviously extends to Noah’s chicken yard.