1 week to go!

Well, we are about one week away from our hatch day.  I hope that at least some of our chicks our growing like they should be and that we will have some hatch next week.  Over the weekend I went to Tractor Supply to get all the items we need for the chicks after they hatch, so we are ready!  Over the weekend I took this picture of one of the eggs - you can really see the blood vessels!  I really hope this is a good sign.

We also had our 5th and last butterfly come out over the weekend, so yesterday we let them go!  Here they are:

We are also checking every day on all of our plant projects we have going on.  Yesterday we noticed that both our sunflower and radish seeds have sprouted.  We could also see the roots growing in our plant viewer that has green bean and pea seeds planted.  Not much progress with our grass seeds yet, so hopefully those will make some progress soon.

 Our sunflower seeds!

Our radish seeds!

 Our plant viewer with green bean and pea seeds!

Until next time!

 

~Ms. Julie

Looks like we have progress!

I started to candle our eggs the other day to check for progress.  I still have a few more that I need to check, but so far I think I am seeing some good progress with some of the eggs.  In quite a few, I can the the network of blood vessels very clearly, as well as what I think is the embryo!  I candled a few of the eggs with the students yesterday and they were pretty excited.  Here is a picture of one I looked at today:

You can't really see the veins in this picture, but I believe that the dark spot toward the bottom is the embryo (hopefully I'm right!).

We are also still waited for our butterflies.  We transferred them to the butterfly house, so each day we continue to check on them to see if they have emerged yet.

 
 In other news, we made these great shaving cream marble Earth projects last week to hang up in the hallway.  It was the perfect display for Earth Day yesterday!

And this week we are studying plants, so we currently have 4 (soon to be 5) different plant projects going on in our classroom right now.  So many exciting things for the kids to check on first thing each day when they come into the classroom!  Hopefully all these projects will have great success!

~Ms. Julie

We Have New Eggs!

Well after our unfortunate incident with the temperature spike in the incubator, I was finally able to go pick up a new set of eggs on Monday morning.  This time we have a mixture of 4 different breeds, 6 of each kind.  I hope that if/when they hatch, we will get some of each of them. The kids were definitely excited to see the new eggs!  We put them in the incubator yesterday, and so far, so good!  The temperature seems to be staying pretty stable.  

I will do the candling with these new eggs for the first time at the beginning of next week.  I hope that we are able to see some progress!

And in other news, our caterpillars have now formed in their chrysalis!  We have transferred them from the cup to the butterfly house, and hopefully pretty soon we will have some pretty butterflies.

Stay tuned!

~Ms. Julie

A Sad Day...

One night over the weekend our classroom incubator spiked to a temperature of 117 degrees.  I knew this had to be a bad sign, so on Monday I decided to candle all of the eggs for the first time and I could not find any good signs of life.  While some things I have read said that there was a chance that the embryos could survive a spike in temperature for a short amount of time, I think it just went way too high.  Since we were only a week into our project, I decided to get rid of the eggs today and I have ordered new eggs from the hatchery so that we can start our project over next week.  The kids seem to understand and were happy when I told them that we could start the project over with a new set of eggs.  I am hoping this time that we do not have another incident like this!

~Ms. Julie

So far, so good... hopefully!

Well, as of today the eggs have been in the incubator for 5 days!  The kids were excited when we put the eggs in on Tuesday and each day they had a chance to check on them.  I seem to have the temperature more stabilized, so I'm hoping that's a good sign and the embryos have started to develop.  I'm nervous about not being at school over the weekend and checking on them every hour, although I will be going in tomorrow to check on them and get a few things done for the week.  So hopefully all is well...

 

We completed our Chicken Life Cycle unit, but the kids will continue to write in their observation journals until the end of this project.  They seemed to enjoy learning two big words this week - oviparous and viviparous!  We read two great books to learn about which animals are oviparous and which ones are not - Chickens Aren't the Only Ones and Animals Born Alive and Well, both by Ruth Heller.

And in other exciting news... our caterpillars came on Thursday!  So we have added those to our science center and will patiently watch as they become butterflies.  We are all about the life cycles right now!

Next week we will do our first round of candling with the eggs to check for progress.  Hopefully it will be a neat experience for the kids.  I just hope to see that they are growing!