SHELLY HEN LAYS EGGS

From hens to fried eggs: where our food comes from.

Even very young children often know that eggs come from chickens. With appealing stylized illustrations and a relatively simple text, Chancellor and Groves explain how it happens. The opening scene introduces a child with brown skin and curly brown hair who holds Shelly Hen, a free-range chicken. The young narrator describes Shelly’s daily activities. In the farmyard, Shelly takes a dust bath, searches for bugs, and chatters with the other chickens in her flock. At night, she has the top spot on the shelves in the coop. In the early morning, the chickens all troop over to their nesting boxes and lay eggs before going outside again. A blond-haired, pale-skinned farmer, shown on the title page, provides supplemental food and water, while the child helps by collecting the eggs from the cleverly designed nest boxes. The child’s reward is a very fresh fried egg snack! The front endpapers feature colorful eggs in their shells; closing endpapers show the fried eggs. The backmatter includes a matching game, more information on hens and on the eggs of other birds, and an easy recipe for a two-egg scramble. On a final page, the author reveals that eggs can hatch chicks, but “for this to happen a hen must meet a rooster.”

Appropriately simple and effective.