Brooke Peels a Boiled Egg
Every Wednesdays, we have soy-sauce braised chicken wings and eggs for dinner. It’s a delicious Shanghainese specialty. On those days, we boil many eggs and the girls help peel them. Well, ‘helping’ implies they save me time, but actually, right now, it takes more time to have them ‘help. ‘ BUT I know investing time now will pay off later when they can do it by themselves! We’ve been practicing for several weeks and luckily for Mama, I was able to capture the first time Brooke (16 months) peels an egg all by herself! I even let her eat it at the end, which I don’t always do.
She’s already broken the shell by tapping the eggs on the table. Here she is starting out.
She peels off the first couple cracked eggshells at the top.
Notice how she uses her thumb to peel away the shell. This took many demonstrations on Mama’s part! It takes a lot of control to be able to use ENOUGH strength to peel the shell but not TOO much strength so your thumb goes through the egg white.
She brings the egg to her lap to work on it.
She’s so concentrated at this point that when I said, “Brooke, turn the egg around,” she actually jumped. Don’t ever interrupt your child when they are engaged or concentrating!
A big piece comes off. Can you see how she just throws the egg shells everywhere as she’s peeling? We gotta work on getting it in the bowl!
The last little bit is left.
She takes it off.
All done. A clean egg!
She breaks the egg in half. No egg yolk for me, thank you!
Brooke enjoys the fruits of her labor.
This activity took a while for the twins to get the hang of. Whether they are successful or not depends a lot on the egg, some eggs are easy to peel and the shell comes off in chunks; some eggshell sticks to the egg and are difficult to peel even for an adult. I find bigger eggs are easier to peel than smaller eggs. However, they don’t care whether they are ‘successful’ or not – they just want to do it!
Even better than peeling is snacking on these organic, omega-3 eggs afterwards!
I did my student teaching (in my own toddler community) last Monday and mentioned to my observer that sometimes we have egg cutting as our protein snack. She replied something about how lovely it is to see the children peeling the eggshells… and honestly it had never occurred to me to have them do that part themselves before! So it was in my head, I was contemplating it, and now you've pushed me over the edge – next week we'll do egg cutting and I will demonstrate how to peel the eggs.
Also, the pictures are lovely.
Thanks!
I have learned that older eggs are easier to peel than fresh eggs. 🙂
Megan,
How did the egg-peeling go?
Stephanie
My assistant convinced me to do cheese instead, because they love it so much and it was the end of school – we only do one protein at a time. But definitely next year!
Steam your eggs in shells for around 15 minutes. Steamed eggs ALWAYS peel easily, no matter how fresh/old. I I can’t wait for my 11-month old to have a go at peeling an egg!
Thanks for this nice piece. My friends and I have been having “lessons” a couple times a week with our toddlers, and I was looking for something food related to do on friday – this will be perfect!