I know that hatching chicks in the classroom is a bit of a controversial thing to do but I can't help but love it. The built up excitement waiting for them to hatch, the endless activities you can offer your kiddos and the most adorable little chirps really just make it such an amazing experience for both you and your students.
Firstly, we wanted to make sure that we were getting our eggs from a place that was humane. We chose a camp that allowed us to return the chicks a week after hatch day. Eventually the chicks would spend the rest of their life at a farm just down the street from the camp.
Here is our final documentation panel when we were completely finished with our inquiry. Keep reading because I'm going to break it all down with centres, activities, how we involved the parent's in several ways and where we got all of our resources from!
We began our inquiry by "hatching" an egg in water. We purchased a "hatch a unicorn" at the dollar store. I also purchased one from Reptilia that was more realistic (Hatch a Chicken) for $3.99. We left blank pieces of paper at a table with the egg in water and asked the children "What do you think will catch?". To involve the parents and have them ask their kiddo at home, we sent a message home on our parent communication and student digital portfolio app called Seasaw. We sent pictures to parent's throughout this entire process and it was so fun. This really spiked their interest and that was that, our next inquiry!
This led us into the topic of oviparous animals. I didn't even know the word "oviparous" before we started all of this haha. I purchased "Let's Get Crackin': An Oviparous Unit" by Shuna Patterson - Pocketful of Littles for $5.50 on Teachers Pay Teachers. You can find it here: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Lets-Get-Crackin-An-Oviparous-Unit-630429. We got this Oviparous Animal Sort activity from the pack.
One of our fellow kindergarten educators had found a fallen birds nest with a broken egg inside (so sad, we know) and she asked if we would like to use it somehow in our classroom. We thought this would be a good way for the kiddos to investigate a real life birds nest. We left the nest in a bag because we didn't want to risk any germs or bacteria getting into our classroom. We also included the book "Crack, Crack Goes the Egg" which was also part of the Oviparous Unit pack I had purchased.
In one of our sensory bins, we left out another birds nest that my teaching partner had for years. We let them touch this nest and investigate it with magnifying glasses.
My teaching partner purchased these cards on Teachers Pay Teachers for $5.00. The activity is called "Oviparous Animals And Egg Matchup Cards" by Miss Charlotte's Web. You can find it here https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Browse/Search:oviparous%20animals%20and%20egg%20matchup%20cards. For this activity, the children could match the animal to its egg. We left pictures of different animals and their eggs for them to look at.
For part of our documentation panel, we had the children draw a picture and write what they think was going to hatch from our egg. Along side this, we added pictures of our activities and pictures of our student's enjoying time and participating in the centres.
Then the real excitement happened! I went to the camp and picked up our eggs. The kiddos were so excited when they saw we were going to be hatching chicks of our own.
We loved how our eggs were different shades of brown. Our students were also intrigued that chicken eggs could be so many different colours. We knew we had to create some sort of activity and centre around this. So this gave us the idea to use paint swatches to match the colour of our eggs. We also included different animal eggs as well to add more colour. This activity was fun and they really seemed to enjoy it.
When our eggs were in the incubator, we started to talk a lot about what is inside an egg, how long a chick takes to hatch and how to hatch a chick. We also had a hatch day countdown that we added a sticker to each day! You can see that on our documentation panel photo at the beginning of this post.
We asked the children questions and had them write them down. Through the centres we provided them, their questioned were answered and we would gradually put them up on our documentation panel! We also included some art work that we had done.
I got this "Inside an Egg" diagram worksheet from a pack I had purchased on Teachers Pay Teachers! The pack is called "Chicken Life Cycle Science and Literacy Activities" by Peggy Means- Primary Flourish and I got it for $6.00. You can find it here https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Chicken-Life-Cycle-Science-and-Literacy-Activities-651361. Although a lot of this pack was better for grade 1 and up, it was still a great resource throughout this entire inquiry. We used quite a bit of it on our documentation panel. The kids LOVED this centre. Loved, loved, loved it! It was one of the more popular ones, which was surprising to us because it was just a worksheet haha.
We sent this to our parents through Seasaw to give them an update on where our chick eggs were at and gave them a question to ask their children home!
This was one of my favourite centres! We had the kiddos candle their own eggs. We had to improvise because we couldn't let the kids candle the real eggs so we used plastic eggs instead. This centre was beyond cute! For this centre, we set out flashlights with some eggs that were empty and some eggs that had a pompom inside. We also left a chart for them to see what the inside of an egg looks like throughout the entire 21 days. If they could see a shadow inside of the egg, they knew there was a chick inside!
The camp that we used didn't provide a brooder box/cage for us to keep our chicks once they hatched so I had to make one for our classroom. For this, I bought a clear storage container from Walmart and cut out most of the lid. I spray painted the lid and added chicken wire to it. I may make a separate post on how I made this! We sent an update on Seasaw after we discussed with the kiddos everything that needed to go in our brooder box to keep our chicks happy and safe and why each thing was important for them. We added pictures of this to our documentation panel and we had the kids write out all of the items we needed for our box. You can see a picture of that on our documentation panel photo at the top of this post!
Then before we knew it, it was the day before hatch day! We filled the parents in on what was happening and that we would be putting together our brooder box for our chicks.
As a class, we put our brooder box together. The kids helped spread the bedding, put food in a dish and fill up a container with water.
And just like that, we were ready for our chicks!!
When the chicks started to hatch, we we're way too excited! We placed a webcam on the incubator and watched them hatch on the data projector. The kids were screaming with excitement! We were lucky to see some of our chicks hatch throughout the day. For our class we made "Hatch Day" crowns. I don't remember where we found them and I don't have any pictures of them, unfortunately. They may have been in the Chicken Life Cycle pack. From the 12 eggs we were given, 10 of them hatched!
We had been sending messages and pictures on Seasaw home to parents all day long so when we came into school the next morning, we had this in front of our classroom from one of our parents haha!
For one of our centres, we left out the shells of the chicks. They looked so interesting inside so we wanted them to investigate the eggs!
We offered the kiddos a "Create a Chick" play dough invitation. These came out very cute!
Then the fun really began! We absolutely adored having the chicks in our classroom. It was so much fun and just a happy place to be! The constant chirping was too cute. As a class, we gave each one of our chicks a name and placed photos of them outside of our classroom for the entire school to see.
We spend lots of time with our chicks! Inside our classroom at the carpet, outside at the end of each day and of course we had them available for our students to see throughout the day!
We noticed that our chicks liked to huddle in two separate groups. We thought it would be fun to create an addition centre based on this. We chose to do this on our light table!
As we got closer to return the chicks date, we thought it would be fun to have the parents into our classroom to see the chicks for themselves and participate in the activities the kids had been doing throughout the entire inquiry before they went back to the camp. We thought it was a great idea considering how involved we kept the parents the entire time! This is the invitation we sent home to parents! We had a full house that day!
It was time to take the chicks back :( We were so upset! We loved our chicks so much and it was such an amazing experience, I could have cried haha. Back to the farmhouse they went!
So there you have it! That was our chick inquiry! I posted as many pictures as I had. We had done several other things but I just didn't document it! Which I should have :(.
This was such a fun experience for us! It was stressful and a lot of work but I am telling you... it is beyond worth it!! I hope that you can use some of these activities and ideas that we had created for our students in our classroom.
Have fun, be creative and enjoy!
Paula
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