Chicks!!

I am so excited to be able to share the fun learning experiences that we had with our baby chicks!

It all started with our incubator and a dozen eggs...

The students got a turn to flip them each day. They learned that this is what Mother Hen does to ensure that the heat gets distributed evenly. After the eggs were flipped, the students signed the log and put up the corresponding embryo picture on the chick development calendar.

 

Throughout this time the students learned all about chickens, wrote in their chick journals, and created cute projects based on chickens.  

On the 18th day we "candled" the eggs to see what was inside.  We found that there were some eggs that were never fertilized. These eggs look clear and you can only see the yolk moving around.  These are the eggs that get sent to the store to be eaten.  They feel lighter than the eggs with a developing chick inside.  This is a picture that I got from the internet that shows what those eggs looked like: 

We also noticed that there were 2 eggs that began to develop, but never finished.  This could be for a variety of reasons, such as the humidity inside the incubator being off, temperature being off, genetically weak chicks, etc.  In these eggs we could see the shadow of a small embryo.  Here is a picture that I grabbed from the internet that is similar to what these eggs looked like:

Finally, there were some eggs that were very heavy and were fully developed.  We could see the light air sack, a dark shadow covering most of the egg, and many of the blood vessels.  We could also see some of the chicks moving inside!  Here is another internet picture that is similar to what we saw (note: the picture is dark, much like what we saw in our classroom.  But if you look closely, you can see the shadow of the chick, as well as the blood vessels):

Then, on day 20 we noticed that there were some eggs that had little cracks.  The chicks were using their egg tooth to begin working their way out!

Before we knew it, there were chicks hatching!  It took about 24 hours for all the chicks to hatch.  The students got to see some of the chicks pushing out of their shells in person.  What a great real life experience!  Here you can see a tired chick, just after hatching and some other chicks drying off and developing those cute downy feathers inside the incubator.

We ended up with 5 chicks all together; 3 hens (the females are darker brown) and 2 roosters (the males are yellow).  The students named them all:

Meet Rosie the Hen

Meet Sparkle the Hen

Meet Gilly Bean the Hen

Meet Flex the Rooster

Meet Fluffy the Rooster

The students loved watching them and learning from them.   They were able to observe them in the brooder box.  The students learned that the chicks like to huddle together under the heat lamp to keep warm.  How cute is this?!?

 We took out a few of the chicks to watch them run around a little and *safely* hold them.

And then... sigh... it was time to say goodbye.  The chicks left in proper fashion... on the school bus!!  We were lucky that the Horse Bus Driver agreed to take all of the first grade chicks.  She was excited to have them on her farm.  Goodbye chicks!  Thanks for teaching us!

Not only was it a great learning experience, but it was a great teaching experience too.  We Google Chatted (much like Skyping) with Mr. Kopa's fourth grade class.  David and Ceres spoke for our class and taught the fourth graders a lot about the life cycle of a chick!  Thank you to Mr. Kopa for putting together this great video!

Click on this link to watch the video