More Chickens!

As many of you have probably heard, either from Ms. Rachael’s email or from your children, our incubator was accidentally unplugged and we will have to start our egg exploration all over. We have still kept up our study of chickens but are waiting until our new order arrives early next week before we start our BIG exploration on different breeds of chickens. When our new eggs arrive we will find out what type of chicken each egg is, then let each child pick their favorite type, and do research on it.

To start off our week we let the children make little chicks and eggs with Play-Doh in art. Ms. Rachael and I thought that the Play-Doh would dry and harden so we could display them in the hallway but unfortunately it didn’t work out. We still had a blast playing with the Play-Doh and developing our fine motor skills and creating beautiful artwork.

This week we spent some time in writing workshop. We encouraged everyone to write a story about either a chicken or an egg and to draw a picture to go along with their story. We put on soft music and let everyone go to work. I was so impressed with all the detail they put into their writing and was so excited for each and every person when they presented. We all had beautiful pictures and either written words or sentences.

We started an experiment this week that I know everyone is super excited about! We placed one egg in a cup of water and another in a cup of vinegar. Then made prediction about what would happen to each egg after one week. If you haven't heard of this before, the acid from the vinegar is supposed to react to the calcium of the egg shell and dissolve the egg shell. After a week, it will leave a rubbery bouncy egg. We got some great guesses about what would happen to our egg after one week. Some guessed that the egg shell would disappear. Others guessed that it would crack. We even had some guess that it would make the yolk inside the egg go away or that nothing would be in the egg shell at all! On the second day we checked the egg and noticed that the outer part of the shell was floating around on top of the vinegar and the pieces floating around were no longer hard and starting to disappear. We cannot wait to see what happens when we get back from the weekend and next Thursday everyone will get the opportunity to touch the egg and make conclusions about what they smell, see, and feel.

On Friday we played games using new words we have learned throughout the first part of our chicken exploration. Here is a list of some of the vocabulary words we have learned:

Egg tooth- “a bump on the chick’s beak that helps them get out of the egg” (Van)

Wattle- “a red thing on the bottom of the chicken’s beak” (William)

Hatch- “when the chick breaks out of an egg” (Harry)

Coop- “house that chickens live in” (Mariano)

Rooster- “a male chicken” (Shlomo)

Hen- “a female chicken” (Ethan)

Chick- “a baby chicken” (Kayla)

Incubation- “to keep the eggs warm so they can hatch” (Scarlett)

Albumen- “the white part of the egg that the chick eats when he’s inside of the egg” (Sally)

Yolk- “the yellow stuff in the egg that helps the chick grow when he’s inside” (Maddie)

Nest- “something the chicken makes that holds eggs” (James)

 

Love,

Ms. Michelle

 

Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.  

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Recall some details in stories read aloud.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Locate patterns in the environment.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.

We are becoming chicken experts using our new game!

We love science experiments!

We are artist making our chicken and egg models...

We are writers in writing workshop!