In the spring, we can cover many of our standards and benchmarks by incubating, hatching, and observing chickens. We began our unit on Thursday, April 10th by putting 14 fertilized eggs into our incubator. We read a book about what chickens need to grow inside the egg. As you can imagine, three-year-olds have trouble with concepts not in the here and now. To help us with our impatience of having to wait 21 days to see our chickens, we made a countdown chain and took off one link for each day so we could visualize how much longer we had to wait. Each day we counted how many days were left until the eggs could hatch. We also were lucky to have plastic models that showed what the embryo looked like each day inside the eggs, so we acted out many of the actions that were happening to the chicks. As we waited, and observed the 14 eggs doing the same thing each day, with hopes of any pecks, we finally got to act out the chicks taking a big breath inside the egg to prepare for their journey into our world. We looked at photos of what the hatchlings would look like when they finally made it out of their eggs and how they would use their egg tooth to peck around the egg and then pop off the top!
Seeing the smiles on the students' faces and hearing their comments, such as how cute the chicks are, asking where the egg tooth is, and can we hold them are all reasons that we teach this unit each year. The photo of our three chicks shows that the kids also learn about nature and how not all eggs produce chickens, even if we keep them warm and safe. Disappointment is not a fun lesson for us, but having three chicks to cuddle helps ease the pain.
Stop by our classroom and we will be glad to show you the rules for observing and holding our chickens (calm bodies, quiet voices, sitting down, and one at a time), and we can answer many questions that you might have about birds!