Dover Pre-K's "Egg Story"

Here are the photos of our egg/chick hatching adventure.  We kept a Smart board calendar to count how many days they were in the incubator.  We also learned other five dollar vocabulary words like temperature and thermometer, which we checked every day.  I think we got more student, family & teacher foot traffic in our classroom in one week than we get in a month.  The science/discovery center was the most popular center in the room, providing lots of opportunity for observation and discussion.  The students were really great about following our guidelines for keeping the chicks safe, happy and letting them rest. 

We marked the egg with an X on one side & an O on the other...

so we could turn each egg evenly.

We turned them every day for almost 20 days!

On Tuesday morning (5/14/13) one little chick had hatched.  

By the end of our morning there were three chicks!

By Tuesday evening there were eleven!

By Wednesday morning there were about 16!

They had to move to a kiddie pool!

The most frequent observation was "they're so cute!" followed by "they poop a lot".

Students helped grind up the feed to make it a little easier to eat.

A little math problem helped us count the chicks.

By Friday 20 of the 23 eggs had hatched and only one little chick needed a bit of help.  The results amazed us all.  How quickly the chicks developed and grew was impressive to witness.  I think learned even more than the students.  I certainly have never given a struggling chick a warm sponge bath before in my life.  On Saturday E's family (Traci, who made this whole adventure possible!) met us at school to pack up the chicks and take them home.  Below are some photos Colby Dix took.

The pool party finished, time to head to the farm!

It was a lot of chicks to catch.

The chicks were getting so agile, the risk of them hopping out & having a chick filled pre-k room
was becoming a real possibility.

Young love.

After weeks of hard work, the incubator could finally be unplugged.

All packed up and ready to move to their new home!

Archer says goodbye to his new friends.

The chicks will be in E's very capable and caring hands.