Chicken Varieties

Hello family and friends!

This week we spent a lot of time talking about the different varieties of chickens in our incubator. First we spent time looking up our chickens on the computer. We looked for images of eggs, chicks, hens, and roosters for each type of chicken egg we have in our incubator (Olive Egger, Easter Egger, Dominque, and Salman Favorelle). Once we found pictures of each type we printed them out and made a matching game. Everyone loved figuring out which images went together and finding similarities between the chicks, hens and roosters for each type.  After learning more about each variety of chicken we asked everyone what their favorite type of chicken was. Our goal is for everyone to learn more about the type of chicken they picked and when they hatch each child will be an expert on different types of chickens!

Wednesday Ms. Rachael and I decided it was time to check and see how our eggs were doing in the incubator. We decided to candle our eggs and get a glimpse at what is going on inside some of our eggs. We only checked three eggs, but of those three eggs they all had signs of chicks developing inside!! Now not all of our eggs will fully develop but it was great to see that something was happening. We are still counting down the days until they hatch and honestly I cannot wait until the 29^th gets here.

Thursday we did an “eggsperiment” or at least we tried...We tried to do the egg in a bottle experiment using a boiled egg, strips of folded paper, a glass bottle, and a match. Supposedly when you place a piece of paper in the bottle, drop the lighted match in and place the egg on top the egg will get sucked in to the bottle! Well we tried multiple times using different kinds of paper and I think we went through about 20 matches, but it didn’t work. This was probably because our bottle was a little too small. We used this experiment as a teaching point to explain that scientists often fail and that’s okay. Scientists keep trying to use different variables, which is what we did. After our experiment failed multiple times we hypothesized different things we might be able to do to make and it and we came up with some good theories. Even though it didn’t work out I know we all still had fun!

The Jewish holiday of Purim is next Thursday and we have been getting ready for the holiday in our class. This week we made Hamantaschen! First we watched a short video during Torah time with Morah Devorah on how to make the Purim treat. Then we set to work on making our cookies. Some of us chose to add jam and other chose to add chocolate to their cookies. We also started making our Mishloach Manot (Purim Gift Basket) to exchange with friends on Purim. On Purim we will dress-up in costumes, listen to the Megillah (story of Ester), exchange our Mishloach Manot, ride horses (yes, that’s right real horses!), and play carnival games made by the fifth graders!

 Love,

Ms. Michelle


Approaches to Learning:

• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
• Show curiosity in an increasing variety of actives, tasks, and learning centers.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
• Understand that a task can be accomplished through several steps

Social & Emotional:

• Use classroom materials responsibility, most of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.

Language & Literacy:

• Retell one or two events from a story read aloud.
• Incorporate favorite parts of literacy texts into play activities.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Display curiosity and interest in learning new words.

Mathematics:

• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.

 Learning more about our different types of chickens...

Making Hamantaschen!

 

 

 

Our attempt at an experiment :)

 

 

We love this Spring weather!

Our Chicks Need A Coop

Hello family and friends!

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.

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.  
• Use classroom materials responsibly, 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.
• Explore books independently.
• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.

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.
• 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...

 

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!

 

 

Our Chicken Eggs Are Here!

Hello family and friends!

I'm happy to announce that we have officially started our exploration of eggs and chicks! We received chicken eggs and are hoping to have them hatched by next month. We were able to get them placed in the incubator last Friday so they've been with us for a week so far.  While we wait, we will be spending time working on some science experiments and doing a lot of research. It's safe to say that we'll be egg and chicken experts by the end of March! Everyone seems really excited about it and we've been checking on our eggs daily. It's important that the incubator stays at 100 degrees, so this has been a great opportunity for us to learn how to read a thermometer and explore numbers in a meaningful way.

To start off the week, we spent a lot of time with our books doing research. We researched in both large and small group settings. We read some books together and looked through them to answer questions. Our reading workshop this week was based around our chicken books. As the kids worked in small groups, they went on picture walks. As with our other studies, we spent time after our picture walks talking together as a large group and asking questions. This week we've been learning a lot about the incubation process. Before placing our eggs in the incubator, we looked at them together and talked about the journey our eggs will go on. We were able to use some books to see an example of what the chicks look like inside the eggs at difference stages throughout the 3 weeks of incubation. We've also learned about the importance of caring for our eggs, such as how to appropriately handle them and how to monitor their incubation. We have 11 eggs in there now so we're hoping to at least have a few chicks in about 2 weeks. They should hatch around March 11th.

We also made a countdown calendar for our chickens. Each day a student gets to mark through another day on our calendar as we get closer to the eggs "due date". Along with our countdown calendar, we made a chart of what chickens have, what they need, and what they give. This has given us the opportunity to talk about the importance of chickens, how we can care for them, and the benefits of raising them.

As we've been exploring our fertile eggs, we've also been talking about the fact that eggs come in a wide range of sizes and colors. We found some eggs of different sizes and compared them in a small group setting. We also spent some time talking about the different parts of an egg and a chicken. We cracked an egg open and learned that the yellow part is called the yolk and the clear part is called the albumen. We also learned that the chicks eat these things while inside the egg to gain nutrients and help them grow. Someone asked what was inside the yolk so we experimented a little by stirring the two parts together. We noticed that there was nothing inside the yolk and that when we mixed the two together, the albumen was still easy to recognize as it didn't mix as well as the yolk. As we cracked the egg, we also explored the shell. We noticed that it has a strong soft lining followed by the hard shell. We also noticed a small air pocket inside the soft lining. We learned that this is used to allow the chick to take it's first breath of oxygen once it starts hatching. We discussed that if our eggs do hatch, the chick will probably be very tired from the hatching experience. We also learned that they will come out wet and sticky but will soon fluff up and be covered in feathers called "down".

On Friday, we were able to spent some time with Mr. Brent's class, learning about a project they have been working on. The 2nd graders made replicas of homes in different countries. They each gave us a small presentation as we walked around and asked questions about their projects. The homes they made were amazing! It was great for the kids to get to talk with the 2nd graders and learn how they used different materials to make their masterpieces. It was a great experience for us and we were so happy to be asked to visit.

It's been a great first week of egg exploration and the excitement from the kids makes it even more fun! I'm looking forward to all of our exploring next week. I hope everyone has a relaxing weekend!

Love,
Ms. Rachael


Approaches to Learning:

• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Show curiosity in an increasing variety of activities, tasks, and learning centers.
• 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.
• Stand up for rights most of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Seek information by looking at texts, signs and photographs in the classroom.
• Begin to use both pictures and text read aloud as cues to meaning of unfamiliar words.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Show one-on-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
• Compare the lengths of two objects.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.

We check on our eggs daily to make sure the temperature is correct...

 

We are researchers! We want to be ready to care for our chickens when they arrive...

We are scientist! We've learned a lot about the different parts of an egg and their importance...

 

 

We are musicians!

 

 

 Thank you, 2nd graders, for your awesome presentations!