PENDLETON — Eggs are fragile and might break if not protected or handled correctly. That’s a lesson some area youngsters learned recently.

Kindergarten students at Maple Ridge Elementary School took part in an egg-drop event after finishing a lesson on animals that lay eggs.

The students made contraptions at home they thought would keep an egg from breaking when dropped — and they put their creations to the test at school Friday, April 21.

With groups of students seated in semicircles around ladders outside the school, a teacher on each ladder proceeded to throw the impact- resistant containers — each containing one egg — into the air, up to heights of eight feet or more. The containers then fell onto the concrete below.

The students then retrieved their projects and brought them to parent volunteers, who helped open them to see if the eggs had survived the fall.

On this day, many eggs survived the fall, packed securely inside boxes surround by energy-absorbing cotton balls or similar material.

Some did not.

Either way, the eggs were thrown away, and students were left to think about what they did right or wrong to keep the shells from breaking.