I'm happy to announce that our second clutch of eggs arrived this week! We were so excited to get this process started again. We've spent a lot of time preparing for them. Even though they have a few more weeks until their hatch date, we felt like it was important to learn as much as we can about them so we'll be well prepared for their arrival! This group is scheduled to hatch around March 29th. We've been having trouble keeping our incubator temperature regulated this time for some reason, but we're still hopefully that we'll have some chicks by the end of the month!
When our eggs arrived we decided to spent a little extra time exploring them. Our previous group arrived at the end of the week and it was important for us to get them incubating so they wouldn't hatch over a weekend. Thankfully, this group arrived on a Monday so we were able to spend time checking them out before the incubating started. We laid out the eggs in a bowl and encouraged the kids to spend time that day looking at them. They were given magnifying glasses and paper for documentation. We were happy to find that our eggs were several different colors! We have brown, blue, green, and a light red/pink color. We were also given paperwork telling us the variety of chickens in our clutch. We currently have 5 Easter Egger chickens, 1 Olive Egg, 4 Dominique, and 4 Salmon Faverolle. That's a total of 14 eggs! The Easter Egger lays blue and light green eggs, the Olive Egger lays a darker olive green egg, and the other 2 varieties produced our brown and tan eggs. We'll be spending next week exploring those different varieties. Wouldn't we awesome if at least 1 of each variety hatched so we could explore them further?!
We've not only been studying chickens, but also eggs. We thought it would be fun to a do strength test with eggs. How strong were these things? Some of us were surprised to read that it's difficult for a chick to escape the egg. Many thought they were not strong (I'm guessing because it's so easy for us to crack them). To do this, we put down a square piece of clay and put one egg in each corner. We took guesses as to how many books we thought our eggs could hold. Most of us thought it would only be 1 or 2. We carefully took turns stacking books up one at a time on top of our eggs. We were amazed to get past 10, 20, 30 books...it took 70 books before our eggs cracked under the pressure! This activity had everyone on their toes. Every time a book was placed on our eggs, they just knew it would be the last one. We were impressed by the strength of those little eggs. It has given us a better idea of how hard it must be for a small chick to break out of something so strong.
The majority of our week was spent making a chicken coop for our new arrivals. We've been reading about chicken houses in some of our books and even found pictures online. We saw that coops are made out of a lot of different materials, mainly wood, plastic, and wire. We've also learned the importance of these homes. They serve to protect chickens from bad weather, protect them from other animals, and provide them with a safe place to sleep,nest and lay eggs. We thought our chicks might need a little coop of their own. This will be a great place for them to run around and play in. I wish you could have seen this in action. The kids got SO involved in this building activity. They looked through pictures for ideas and spent one morning brainstorming all their thoughts. After we had our ideas gathered, we went to work. We had tons of cardboard boxes (thank you for the donations!) and made sure our art center was loaded with supplies. We really just stepped back and let the kids go to work. This coop was designed by the kids and really all we did was give some guidance on where we might need tape to keep the walls upright. They did all the taping, folding, and decorating. I'm so impressed with not only their ideas, but their team work. They worked together to make a couch, TV, toilet, and even a back patio. Seriously, check out the back patio...they had that thing attached to the coop before I even realized that was an idea they had! This thing is their baby and I'm so proud of them! We are planning to keep it on display until our chicks arrive. After that we will make room for it in the classroom and allow the chicks to spend some time running around in it. Here were some of their brainstorming ideas:
Shlomo: a cage for the coop
Taliah: a fence and a dish for food and water after they play
Maddie: a hold in the roof for us to see inside and check on them
Sally: make it look like a barn
Rand: big open area for them to run around in
Scarlett: stickers to decorate the coop with
Kayla: a sign on our coop so everyone knows what it is
Van: a bed for the chicks with a blankets and pillows
William: keep the coop next to their cage so they can go back and forth
Max: a door and a roof
Ethan: put the cage under the coop
To finish our week, we concluded our egg experiment from last week. We noticed that our egg soaking in the water didn't change but our vinegar egg looked very different! There was no longer a hard shell and the color had changed to yellow. To test our experiment conclusion, we poked the egg and felt it in our hands. We noticed that even though there was no shell, it was soft and felt bouncy. We learned that the acid from the vinegar dissolved the calcium in the hard shell.
We're excited to learn more about our chicken varieties next week! I hope everyone enjoys their weekend!
Love,
Ms. Rachael
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
- Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
- 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.
- Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.
- 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.
- Explore books independently.
- Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
- Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.
- 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.
- Identify the positions first through tenth using concrete objects.
- Associate time concepts with a clock.
Exploring our eggs before we placed them in the incubator...
Studying the strength of eggs with books...
We are builders! Check out our awesome chicken coop...
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