Happy Birthday!

Today was hatching day and our first chick arrived! A chick has an egg tooth, a hard point on it's beak, that helps it to poke through the membrane and shell where it has been living for the past 21 days. Our first chick began poking at it's shell at 8:15 this morning. We watched it all day as it peeped and wiggled in it's shell for hours, resting often. This initial pecking is called "pipping". It seemed as if the hatching was not progressing very quickly and by 3:00 the same little hole we saw in the morning was the only evidence of the life inside. As the students left for home, they all stopped by the incubator to say "good-bye" and give words of encouragement to the little chick. I think their encouraging words were heard because when I returned to the classroom after dismissal at 3:10, the chick had made a significant crack! Over the next 45 minutes the chick made a "zipper" around the egg and pushed it's way out. By 4:00, the wet chick had joined the world, loudly peeping all the while! It took about 8 hours of hard work to get to it's birthday! It will spend tonight in the incubator drying and resting. We will began making a brooder for it in the morning.

Out in the Garden

We ended Earth Week by heading out into the Lowell School Helping Hands Community Garden to see what we can find. There are many plants already growing after their long winter sleep. We also found some living things UNDER the soil! After spending a good amount of time digging in the soil, we discovered that we could find earthworms if we dug down deep enough. We will be studying these favorite little creatures in the next few weeks while we wait for our chicken and duck eggs to hatch.
Our afternoon in the garden ended with an impromptu concert from the Lowell school orchestra as they came outside to practice in the sun. Then we came inside and started pumpkin plants for the garden by planting seeds we saved from the pumpkin we harvested and studied last fall. I can't think of a better way to spend the afternoon with my kindergarten friends!

Waiting and Wondering...

We're checking the temperature, filling up the water, watching the eggs turn, and waiting. It is day 16 on our count-down calendar and we can hardly wait! The chicks have another 5 days to incubate. As we wonder what is going on in there, we check our development chart. Wow! These babies are growing fast! Soon they will outgrow their egg shell and join us in the classroom :0)

Exploring the Egg

Today we explored unfertilized chicken eggs. These are the eggs that you buy at the grocery store and will never form a baby chick. We cracked the shell and explored all the parts of the egg. We also learned the terms yolk, albumen, and chalazae. For information about the parts of the egg and their function, check out this 4H embryology link: http://4hembryology.psu.edu/partsn.html

Egg-xercise

Our eggs get their exercise every day! In nature, eggs are turned several times a day by the mother hen while she is brooding. This keeps the babies inside the eggs healthy. We have automatic egg turners in our incubators to turn our eggs for us, day and night. Eggs have a narrow end and a wider end. The head of the chick (or duckling) will grow in the wide end. We have our eggs in the incubators with their pointed-end slightly down so that the babies don't have to stand on their heads!

The digital incubator that we are using has an alarm that notifies us when it is about to turn the eggs. It seems that whomever is near the incubator when the alarm sounds, rushes over to watch the eggs roll. (I find myself running over too!) Who knew that egg exercise could be so exciting!

They're Here!

Our eggs arrived last Wednesday the 7th. We recieved 8 chicken eggs and 3 duck eggs. The chicken eggs are many different colors ranging in white to dark red/brown. We also have two different sizes of chicken eggs. We wonder if they are from two different kinds of chickens...we'll have to wait and see!

Getting started....

We have set up the incubators in our discovery center and we are waiting for them to warm up so that we can fill them with eggs! We will be hatching duck eggs and chicken eggs over the next 3-4 weeks. We have two different incubators. The large incubator is a styrofoam-style incubator that can hold a dozen or more eggs. The smaller incubator is a new digital incubator that can hold three eggs. The incubators will be doing the job of the mother duck or chicken. They will be keeping the eggs warm and safe while the babies grow inside.

Welcome to our blog!

We are set to embark on a new learning adventure as we begin the next unit of study in our science curriculum: animals! We will be studying pairs of animals and comparing their body structures, habitats, and behaviors. We will be using this blog as a means to share our learning with our families and our friends so that all of you can see where our new learning adventures take us! Enjoy the blog with your Kindergartener!