All things CHICKEN!

It's been a very busy couple of days. I will start with our great chicken news. On Tuesday just after lunch, Mrs. K ran into our class and yelled in excitement that our eggs had crack in them! WOWZA! So the webcam started rolling and we streamed it all over the school. So sure enough, egg # 11 had a beautiful chip in the top. 

Not very much later, egg #8 joined in the fun with a tiny crack in the bottom: 

 And egg # 5 started to crack as well:

It was so exciting but no further progress occurred. By the time I had to leave for the night, a few of the crack were a bit bigger but no sign of chicks yet. As soon as I got home I jumped on the computer and started streaming our egg feed some more. You could see the little parts of the eggs move as the chick worked so hard to get free. A big chip came off of egg # 11 just before the camera shut off for the night. 

The next morning, I left my house about an hour earlier than normal. I couldn't contain my excitement. I was the 3rd car in the parking lot. I came into the school and had to ask the custodian to let me into the classroom. And look who I got to meet!!!!! 

We had a baby chicken! One of our eggs had hatched in the night. He was still wet and wobbly. Oh so so cute. I was in love. 

Here is our 1st selfie: 

The other eggs had made some progress but no new chicks yet from the other eggs. I could see little beaks peeking out and little chickens moving around inside.

Before I knew it, it was time to go on duty. We had a hard time taking our eyes off of the hatching eggs. Every classroom could stream these little guys hatching. What a fantastic mixture of science and technology.

We watched chick # 6 and chick # 8 hatch during the day. What an amazing experience.

We had 4 chicks that had hatched when I had to leave for my part-time job after work. I got to work and logged onto the computer to watch the 5th chick hatch. Then when I got home that night there were 6 chicks and 1 was just working hard to hatch too. Before I went to bed we had 7 chicks in that incubator and a couple more were starting to crack.

This morning when I got to work I was surprised to find 9 chicks in that incubator. NINE chickens!!! WOW!!! Egg # 1, 2, and 12 had no progress still which is normal. They may not have been fertilized in the first place so we weren't concerned. One of the EA's and I carefully moved our chicks to their new home. CHICKtopia was awaiting them.:

Our chicken's seemed much happier and relaxed in their spacious brooder box. They found the warm spot under their light and all settled down for their first of many naps.


Throughout the day some of them got to come out to play with the teacher's, ECE's, EA's and everyone in between. We took 4 groups through today of our kindergarten children to have a time to look closely, ask questions and pet them. We will try holding a little later but for now we started with petting

I only got pooped on 3 times today. Not too bad. They are the cutest little things ever and I am so amazed by all that they go through. I love their chirping. It is so beautiful. That's all for now in regards to our chickens. I will leave it at that and share some other very important updates another time. Thanks for reading!

Chicken update as we prepare to become mommy's and daddy's

I wanted to find a few minutes to update you on our chickens as some amazing things have happened in our class. I took some photos of the eggs the other day:

Notice anything new? You shouldn't. They still just look like eggs. But we are less than 48 hours away from our hatch. Our chickens are getting too big for those shells now and are almost able to reach the air pocket and take that first very important breath. Wow. What a miracle of life. What an honour to facilitate this process. I think it may mean more to me than it does to my children but they are sure getting excited too. We have been sharing what the inside of those eggs look like every single day with the ihatch app. The children have also been drawing their own interpretations and writing a sentence about all that is happening. We are already at day 19. How time flies. 

The children can tell you what all the parts inside the egg are, how the chicken will hatch, how long it may take, what growth and development is happening etc. They are totally getting this. On Friday we did a craft together for them to take home and share with their family's. It was 2 plates that spin to show the different stages of development inside our eggs. The majority of them turned out amazing. They knew the order they needed to go in since they have been watching these chicks grow since day one. 

I hunted for the link for this activity but of course I can't find it now. If you go to www.agclassroom.org/ut and click on teacher centre, then resources you can find a similar paper by searching for kindergarten science resources. It's call "inside the egg, hatching chickens".

But here is what it looked like:

There were 8 pictures in total for the kids to colour and cut out. Then they glued them on the plates and hey budda boom budda bing. 

Ok, now I can get to the really cool part. With the hatching fast approaching, Mrs. K went to the principal to see if there was any way at all that we could have the incubator in our classroom during the  3 days of potential hatching. The eggs would not be touched, the incubator lid would not be removed please pretty please! Well we can't but our principal came up with an AMAZING solution for us. Are you ready for this? We are live streaming it to our classroom via webcam. Yup you read that right. Our principal went out and bought a webcam. A computer was relocated to right beside our incubator and set up to live stream the eggs. It's on from whenever we log in in the morning until 8pm at night. I believe it took a lot of work through our school and head office to get everything in place. They worked fast and it is such am amazing solution. We got a bunch of licences too so that the majority of the classes can live stream the hatch at the same time. I am so excited for this now. And as for our class, we have been watching bird feeders through a web cam since the beginning of school so this is a concept we are already familiar with. Now we can have the hatching happening all day and still go on with our daily business. I am so blessed to have I this kind of support at our school. They recognized how important this was for our class and went above and beyond to find a solution for us. If you ever read this blog, please know how much this meant to all of us! Thank you!

Finally, over the weekend it was time to put together a brooder box in preparation for our hatchlings. Greenacres recommended a cardboard box 24" X 24" X 18". As someone who is sized challenged I thought a bankers box would fit that scale. I had googled cheap and easy ideas for brooder boxes for classroom use and the best idea I saw had used a bankers box. So when I went to buy one, the sizes were 12"x12"xsomething small. Not even close to what I needed. This was a way more complicated job than I had expected. 4 stores later I was at solutions and looking at their cardboard boxes. I found a big plastic box that was similar to the size I needed but I really didn't want to spend $32.99 on it. So I was humming and hawing over the cardboard ones as none of them were my exact dimensions. I ended up going with a box that was 18"x18"x27". I duct taped it together at home and Laid the box on its side. Then I cut my own top into it. So here is a bad photo from the side:

I cut half the top off by cutting down into the side, and the other half just straight off. My dad and sister helped me out here too. We added dowels under the lid to support the weight from the light. There is also a hole cut in the top for the light to go through. 

We had a piece of plexiglass lying around that we used to help keep some of that heat in but since the roof is 2 different heights, it also allows for air circulation and a great viewing window!

I duct taped a garbage bag in the bottom to help with spills and then covered the whole bottom with wood chips. Yes there are 3 thermometers there. They won't all be there when the chicks come but I had purchased the little round one and we were just ensuring that the temperature reading was accurate.

As a final note for tonight, here is our baby chickens today:

I can't wait to share about the hatch!

Word wall

I just have a few things to share and I am really trying to keep this one short and sweet. I'm working my kindergarten job, a part time retail job and putting myself through some university courses so time is of the essence. Right now I feel like I'm even scheduling meal times into my day planner just to time manage to the fullest. Okay, enough about that....

I wanted to share this new word wall Mrs. K and I created. We got the idea from another teacher (the one we do reading buddies with in fact). And we even asked our high school volunteer student to create the chart for us.... So I guess we really didn't make it at all hahaha. Any way, the point here is that this is a great idea. It just has post it notes on each of the squares and this word wall can be inquiry specific - as in for us, we are doing birds and working on our chicken eggs right now so we are filling this word wall with all the new words we are learning to go with our hatching program (incubator, hatching, brooding, comb, egg tooth, etc.). But this could also be used for just generic words the children are struggling with. Or it could be used for new words that get brought up throughout the course of the year. 

The children really took a liking to this chart and used it for their egg observation book. It gave them a bit more independence with their writing since they could easily walk over to the chart, find the letter of the word they were trying to spell and then using their sounding out skills to figure out which word they needed to use. It got a lot of use on its first day in our class!

Day 3 of our eggs

So here we are on day 3. The children are getting so excited now. It's a bit more palpable with their eagerness to go and visit the incubator. I wanted to share our egg wall again (in case you missed it yesterday):

So I put up all those eggs on our wall and every day that goes by I stick up what our chicks look like on the inside of their egg. It's a nice reference point for the children to look at and keeps us counting down to hatch day. Today our baby chicks are starting to get their limb stumps and their heart is starting to form. 

At lunch today we watched the magic schoolbus episode where they go inside an egg and get to watch it grow. We had watched it before but I decided we should watch it again now that we have our own chicks. They were so excited to see some of the similarities between our chicks and the magic schoolbus chicks.

We also added to our observation books today so the children drew out what the egg looks like and wrote a sentance. When they had finished day 1, 2, and 3 we let them sneak a peek at day 4 and 5 since we will not be in school over the weekend. Tomorrow our chicken's heart starts to beat and on Sunday they begin to look more like a chicken.

It's a pretty exciting time to be in our class! I'm sorry for the jumpy post today. It's a bit short and sweet as I watch my iPads battery level decrease. Have a great weekend and I can't wait to share more next week.

Day 2 of our chicken eggs

Only 19 more days to go! I made a chart for our wall today to mark the days. 

I just cut out egg shapes and wrote the day on them. Then I took a poster of the egg development, and cut it apart into individual pictures. I blew up each day to a much bigger size and cut them out. I laminated everything and now every day that passes, we will put up the picture to go along with it. 

I also made a sign to sit beside the incubator that says "today:" and then each day I put up what is happening inside the eggs. So today's said "Today: my eyes and ears are starting to form".

Our ihatch app today showed us how the vessels are forming in our little embryos and it now has eyes and ears. Pretty exciting. 

One more note before I head to bed... The kids are getting excited now. I saw it a bit in there play today and in their understanding of our new words like "incubator", "thermometer", and "Brooder box" just to name a few. Mrs. K made some science books today on her prep for us to start using. We made writing paper with an egg shape for the picture square and the lines underneath for writing. Each day we will encourage the children to expand on what they are observing and learning and write/draw about  it on there paper. Then we will have a nice book to send home in the end. Some of their drawings were so good today!