Green Eyed Chicken: Meanwhile, in room 105.....

I am a first grade teacher. WAIT! before you mouse over and hit the unsubscribe button ,let me assure you that this is NOT a teaching blog. You will not be wowed by my clip art skills and use of fancy fonts, nor will you find 1,000 uses for paper towel tubes and glitter to help kids read at grade level. Not my thing.

I thought the first grade students (4 sections) would enjoy incubating some eggs. It was a nice tie-in with our life cycles unit and hopefully I would end up with some chickens for our coop and my students would have a real-life hands on experience. I found a woman on craigslist.com who had eggs for sale and was willing to take the chickens back if I was going to have too many in my coop.

This is where the eggs came from

The incubator was an antique I tell ya but at least it had an automatic turner so this teacher could stay home on the weekends with her baby and not worry about regulating temperature and rotating eggs every few hours. School on the weekends, not my thing.

The temperature inside an incubator needs to stay at a steady 100 degrees and the humidity needs to stay at 98 degrees. The incubator has a wet and dry thermometer which our students were very diligent in checking every hour. I was made aware of even the slightest variance in temperature. Here in very dry Colorado the humidity was the biggest worry, with this class of 23 mama hens constantly doting on this incubator I knew we were not going to have any problems.
The incubator was in my classroom but the other 3 classes came over to spend time with the eggs and write in their chicken journals.

There are many life lessons to be learned from incubating and hopefully hatching eggs. I was learning right along with my class and this was totally my thing. First off, the old saying "don't count your chickens before they hatch," wow, is this ever important! My class was already coming up with a list of 12 names for our new borns. They were discussing paint colors and picking out curtains for the nursery and the eggs hadn't even been with us a whole day! I didn't want them to get their hopes up so I told the class to pretend we were not going to be successful at all so that we would be pleasantly surprised if we had one hatch. One of my students raises her hand and says "Mrs. J, what about staying positive? My mom always tells me to be positive, so let's pretend only one is going to hatch, that better than none." Wow! talk about learning from your students. Alright there you have it, class, we will hope that one will hatch and be thankful if we get more than that.

Everyday my students wrote in their egg journals documenting changes in the growing embryos inside the egg through candling and posters I found online with a "peek inside." We discussed chicken facts and chicken lingo such as pecking order, ruffle your feathers, and calling someone a chicken. This was a fantastic, community building experience with the grade level. It's amazing to see behavior issues fall by the wayside when your entire class is engaged. This was easily the highlight of everyone's day and so far, it was just a bunch of eggs in a bubble.

Fast forward 21 days and you have a classroom full of 23 expectant mothers. "Mrs. J, today is our due date, where are our chicks?" Another lesson about things growing at their own pace and babies coming when they are ready. Go ask your mothers if you were an on time baby. That night our first chick hatched! We arrived the next morning to see a black little fuzz ball in the incubator. How exciting! Then we noticed a chip in another egg and there went my plans for the day! We set up the document camera so everyone could watch the miracle of birth on the big screen. The other first grade sections piled into the classroom and we just watch and cheered this little lady (hopefully) on as she chipped and wiggled her way out of the shell. WOW!
After all was said and done, we ended up with 6 chicks and it took 3 days for them all to hatch.
Turns out first graders aren't any better at naming chicks than 2 year olds. Each section got to name a chick and the other 2 were named by our literacy specialists. While we were voting, I had to discreetly throw out Blackie, Baby, Little Lady and Honky. You can't make this stuff up, I swear! One child told me "I have chickens at home and my favorite one is Pecker." Seriously parents, Pecker?! Not in my classroom or coop. We came up with Autumn, Chicken Little, Peeps, Maybell, Daisy and Midnight.

A Few Baby Pictures