Today We Said Goodbye...

Today was the last day we had our chicks in the classroom.  This afternoon I brought the chicks to Parky's Farm, where hopefully they will have a nice, happy life.  I was originally planning to keep the chicks a little longer, but we are getting so close to the end of the school year and things are just getting a little too busy.  Of course it didn't help that we were set back by 2 weeks with this project when we had to start over with a new set of eggs.  

So we only had our chicks for about a week, but it was amazing how attached I felt to them!  It was a little hard to give them up today.  I took lots of pictures and some videos of them over the last 2 days.  Unfortunately, the last 2 out of our 7 that hatched died this week.

Here are some more pictures:

I'm really going to miss these guys.  This was a great project, hopefully I'll be able to do it again next year.  I'm also hoping that we might get to see these chicks when we go to Parky's Farm for a field trip in June.

7 out of 24 - Not too bad!

We are all done with incubating our chicken eggs.  We had a total of 7 hatch out of our 24 eggs.  On Sunday, I decided it was time to get rid of the eggs that didn't hatch since it was almost a full week since our scheduled hatch day.  I would say that 7 isn't too bad since this was my first experience!  The kids were so excited each time a new one hatched.

Unfortunately, 2 out of the 7 seem to have something wrong with them.  They are still alive and they are eating and drinking, but one has some kind of deformity in his neck - he is kind of bent over to the side.  He had trouble hatching and we ended up with assisting him when it looked like he wouldn't be able to get out of the shell by himself.  The other one, which was our last one to hatch, has a chunk of membrane from the shell stuck to his back.  I tried to get it off of him, but he was squirming around like crazy and I had no luck.  Hopefully these two will turn out to be ok, but for right now they are alive. 

Here are some more pictures of our 7 chickies!  

We Have Chicks!

Last night we had our first chick hatch completely, and then when I came in this morning we had a 2nd one!  We also have 2 more eggs that are definitely trying to hatch.  Not sure about the other 17....

Here are some pictures!

I will post more pictures later!

~Ms. Julie

It's Finally Started!

On Monday we were at our 21st day of incubation, but we did not have any pipping yet!  We have been waiting patiently and this morning when I can in, I saw that 2 chicks have started to pip!  The students were so excited to take a look at them.  Since this morning I have noticed a few more that look like they are starting to pip as well - I have even heard some chirping and seen a few of the eggs rocking back and forth!  Here is one picture of the first egg I saw with a crack in it:

(It's a little hard to see, but if you look at the egg right above the thermometer there is a small crack in the shell.)

 

I will update again when we have more progress.  Hopefully by tomorrow we will have some chicks!

 

~Ms. Julie



We are in the Hatch Stage!

Tomorrow (Monday) is the 21st day of incubation for our eggs.  The eggs are not supposed to be turned during the last 3 days, so yesterday I went in and removed the eggs from the automatic turning tray and they are now laying flat in the incubator.

      

I also took the opportunity to candle each egg one last time to see if there were any that I should definitely get rid of.  Some of them I was not sure about, but there were 3 eggs that I did take out.  One showed no sign of growth, so I think it was infertile.  The other two looked like quitters - they started to develop but then died.  So my one student that was such the optimist and predicted that all 24 eggs would hatch unfortunately will not be right!  I took this picture of one egg that I thought looked really promising:

You can see that it is mostly dark with some visible blood vessels and a small air pocket at the very bottom.  I also thought I saw some movement in there when I was looking - I really hope I'm right!

Hopefully tomorrow we will see some chicks starting to pip.  It take about a full 24 hours for a chick to completely emerge from the shell, so I don't think we will have any chicks tomorrow (but hopefully by mid-week we will).  I'll post again with pictures if/when it happens!

~Ms. Julie

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