Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Hatching Baby Chicks Unit Study

There's much excitement going on in our household today. Not only are we in full swing of celebrating Easter, but our guests are starting to arrive. What guests are you wondering? Our chicks of course. Back during Ee week while reading about eggs, I signed us up for an embryology class to hatch our own little chicks. For the last 21 days we've taken care to rotate the eggs 3 times a day and make sure all the chicks were comfy and cozy. Here's a few of the happenings...

Our Book Basket



Our Sensory Bin
The kids enjoyed this thoroughly. And it's yet another use for those plastic Easter eggs. Inside some of the eggs were painted wooden eggs the kids place in the nest. Others contained fuzzy chicks. We even included some yummy yellow peeps (A huge favorite). And big boy thought it a good idea to put the toob animals that were oviparous inside some eggs. He even sequenced them in size order and made other various patterns.







Our Chick Countdown Calendar
For Big Boy it was a true test in patience. When we first picked up the eggs, he thought they would hatch immediately. To bypass the disappointment, we created a chick countdown calendar. Here and here are "egg"cellent sources for all kinds of printables.




21 Days ago


We placed the eggs in the incubator...


Welcome Sign


Princess' Welcome to the world sign for the chicks. Can you see how excited she looks?


Today...

The start of our chicks hatching!




















More updates to follow...stay tuned!!!

3 comments:

Erin said...

How exciting!!! Are you going to keep them and raise them to full-grown chickens? I was strongly considering doing this ourselves, but our city just had a council meeting in which allowing backyard chickens was proposed and unanimously shot down. :( I figured we'd better not push it and add more chickens to the five we already have! For now, our neighbors don't mind our hens, so that's a good thing!

What do you feed them when they are tiny newborn chicks?

Tiny Actions said...

I signed up to do this through the local university and we bring the chicks to a farm when they are a week and half old. Our city ordinaces do not allow backyard chickens, so I never even thought about keeping them. Honestly, this has been quite an experience for me as well. I grew up as a suburban girl and no where near the country. So, I'm not all that familiar with any of it and am thankful the university had a class for me to take. They also provided us with feed to last a couple of weeks. It's like little pellets and man oh man does it smell! Your girls would really get a kick out of a little project like this. You should investigate it out in your neck of the woods.

Erin said...

That would be great if we could give them back, since we really shouldn't keep them along with the others! I will have to check around and see what we can find... our local college has beef and airy cows and sheep, I think, but not chickens that I know of.