We Are Almost There!

Tuesday of this week marked 2 weeks of our eggs in the incubator.  I candled all of them again to check their progress and most of them looked good!  Here are a few pictures...
 

 

 

I did remove 2 of the eggs that did not have any signs of growth, se we are down to 22 eggs now.  Today was the 18th day, so I have removed the turning tray and bumped up the humidity level.  Hopefully over the next few days we will see some hatching start!

 

 

In other news, our sunflower seeds have been growing a lot in our cups, so today we planted them in the ground outside!

 

 

 

 

And we re-planted our bean and pea seeds into larger pots since they were growing so much!  We initially planted them in a plant viewer so the kids could see the roots as the plants started to grow.

 

 

Hopefully I will be able to make another post soon with some good hatching pictures!

 

~Ms. Julie

 

 

 

 

 





Week 1 Success!

Yesterday marked a full week of our chicken eggs being in the incubator!  I was so excited to do the first round of candling all the eggs to see which ones were winners (fertilized and growing), quitters (started to grow but died/quit) and yolkers (eggs that were never fertile).  We definitely have a few winners in the group and as I was candling them all I made sure to take some notes.  There were quite a few that I think are winners but had a little bit of a hard time deciding what I was seeing in the eggs.  The dark brown ones were the most difficult, but I think we have some winners for all 4 kinds of eggs that we have!  I picked 4 of the best ones to show to the kids, and they were all excited.  We even wrote in our chicken observation journals to record what we saw. 

I also managed to take a few good pictures:

 

If you look toward the bottom of the egg, you can see the dark spot, that is the embryo and the dark spot is the chicken's eye!  You can also see some healthy blood vessels.

 

 

We got to see a lot of movement with the enbryos in some of the eggs, which is really exciting!

 

 

 

Last week we did some cute art projects as we were learning about chickens and other oviparous animals.

 

Our robin nest project

 

Mother Hen and Chicks directed drawing

 





We will candle our eggs again next week on Tuesday or Wednesday to check for continued progress.  By then I will definitely take out any eggs that I know for sure are quitter or yolkers to have more space in the incubator before we enter the hatch stage.  I'll also take some more pictures of the eggs to post by then!

 

~Ms. Julie

Chicken Hatching Project is Back!

This year we are doing the chicken egg hatching project again!  The kids were very excited about the project when I told them about it before our Spring Break.  Yesterday, we took a trip to Mount Healthy Hatcheries and picked up 2 dozen fertile chicken eggs.  We have an assortment of eggs again this year!

From top to bottom, we have:

6 Rhode Island Reds

6 Araucanas

6 Buff Orpingtons

6 Black Australorps

 

This afternoon we put the eggs in our incubator.  We waited until today to put them in so that the hatching day will be during the week instead of over the weekend.

 



 

 

Each student also made a prediction for how many eggs they think will hatch!  Some students were very confident... me, not as much!  We also filled in the first page of our chicken observation journals today.

 

We also have a countdown where we will color in one egg each day until we reach 21 days!  3 weeks is kind of a tough concept for the kids to understand, so this way they can see how many days have passed and how many more we have to go.

 

 

 

Hopefully everything goes smoothly this year and we don't have any incidents with a temperature spike in the incubator.  We don't have any extra time to start this project over this year!  We have been learning about the chicken life cycle and today students were able to put the pictures in the correct order.

 

 

We will do our first round of candeling next week to see if there is any progress!  



 

~Ms. Julie