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