steppin' up to first grade: May 2015

The chicks have finally arrived! It has been a busy and wonderful 2 weeks around here and boy do we want to share with you!

This was my first time successfully hatching and I gotta say it was such a rewarding experience. I highly recommend doing this in your classroom. It is such a great way to teach kids about patience, animal life cycles, the scientific method i.e. making observations and predictions, caring for animals and so much more!
Here are a few things I learned (the hard way, following directions with precision and accuracy is not really my forte :p ).
1. Research thoroughly before committing to a huge project that involves living things a.k.a. living animals. 2. Follow directions daily (the first time we tried hatching, there were several mistakes we made which caused the hatch to be unsuccessful (unfortunately, none of the chicks made it) *I learned that it is extremely important to have the temperature regulated well before putting the eggs in the incubator. 3. Before you even get the eggs, have a plan for where the chicks will go once they are ready to "graduate" from your classroom. Then have a back up plans and a back up-back up plan (because the last thing you want is to not have a good home secured when they are too big for the classroom and need to move on). It never hurts to have more than one contingency plan in place.
The Big Moment! So the little chicks started hatching on Mother's Day. I checked on them on Sunday morning and they had just started pipping. This is what greeted me when I checked on them Monday morning.

Isn't that so amazing? I felt so giddy when I saw that. I think I was more excited than my students!

This was right after one of our chicks had hatched. We had to keep them in the incubator for several hours so they could dry off before transporting them to their new home.

This is what the shells looked like right after the chicks hatched. Pretty amazing huh?

You can tell the chick on the far right is still drying.

The kids were SO excited to finally get to hold the chicks.

Before holding the chicks, I sent a permission slip home with each of my students and asked their parents to give permission.

You can download a free copy

HERE

And finally, this is what the chicks looked like this past Friday. They grew so much in the last 2 weeks. This past week they developed tail and wing feathers. They started getting really rambunctious. By the end of the week they were running around, jumping off their feeder, dumping over their water container and acting really wild.

It's amazing how fast they grow!

Here are some fun ways we explored chick life cycles and incorporated our new schema into our classwork.