Preparing the Brooder

Our chicks are due to hatch tomorrow, so we had to get their brooder ready for them! We bought a big Rubbermaid bin and filled it with pine flakes, we had to make sure we didn't use fine pine shavings because the chicks would inhale those and it would be bad for their breathing! We filled up their food container and put their water container in their bin. We didn't put water in it yet because we wanted it to be fresh when we put them in there. We put a heat lamp on the side of the bin, we all tested it too...it was very warm! And the most exciting part of our day was....we had moving eggs!!!!! A few of our eggs are moving around which means we should have baby chicks by tomorrow!!!



Scooping their food into it's container





Making sure the pine shavings are just right



IT'S MOVING!!!!!!!

VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

It's that time to start picking names for chickens! Thank you to everyone who sent in name suggestions, we had almost 90 names to choose from. We narrowed it down to the top 15..

Here's how it's going to work:
There is a poll on the right...go pick your favorite names! The name with the most votes goes to the first chick that hatches, the second most popular name goes to the second chick that hatches and so on. We will do that until all of our chicks have names. If you handed in a name suggestion and your name gets chosen, you will get a prize. The only exception to this is if a name was suggested more than once (we had several names that almost EVERYONE suggested, there won't be a prize!). We will post the results on Tuesday after we know how many chicks we have. Stay tuned....

Egg Candling

Jessica came to candle our eggs today! We were SUPER excited and it was really cool to see. She used a very, very old projector to candle the eggs. Scroll through the pictures and at the bottom of this post we will tell you how many good eggs we had!

Setting up the projector!

How many chickens will we have??????

Trying to see inside the eggs

LOOK!!! This is a great egg, the dark space is the baby chick growing inside, and the orange space is the air pocket it will use to breath when it is hatching out of it's shell!

We had 11 out of 12 good eggs!! This means there is a possibility we will have 11 baby chicks!!!!!!!!!

Stay Tuned

Today at 12:30, Jessica Decker from Double Decker farms is coming to candle our eggs! Candling is a special light that lets us see into the egg. We will know how many eggs are growing the right way after today, check back in tomorrow morning for pictures and an update!

What's Inside the Egg?

We did a craft project yesterday! We read a book called "Chick Life Cycle" by Elizabeth Bennett and then made our own books. The book showed us what the eggs look like on the inside when the chicken is growing inside. We learned a lot of interesting things...look at our pictures below!

Hen's lay a few eggs a day but only an egg that's been fertilized by a rooster has a red spot in it that will eventually grow into a baby chick, the other eggs are the ones we buy at the grocery store!

This is a picture of the egg inside on Day 3, the embryo is teeny tiny, but it's in there!

This is day 6, the chick now has two wings, two legs and a beak!

This is day 13, the chick has feathers and claws on their toes.

This is day 16, the yolk is almost gone and the chick will have nothing left to eat if it doesn't hatch soon.

This is day 19, the egg is TOO small, the chick is almost ready to come out!

Day 21...the chick finally hatched!

Double Decker Farm

When our chicks hatch we will keep them in the classroom for a couple of days, but when they start getting bigger we won't have room for them in our classroom. We are going to send our chicks back to the farm where their eggs came from!It is called Double Decker Farm. They will have lots of fun there and there will be a lot of animals for them to play with. Look below to see all of the different animals! We have some of their names and some fun facts about them!

This is Milo!

This is Echo, she is the livestock guardian dog, she loves goats! She is an Akbash Dog!

This is Aflac and Cayuga, Aflac is a pekin boy duck and Cayuga is a Cayuga girl duck!

These are some of the chickens on the farm, soon our chickens will be there to hang out with them.

This is Pickle, he is a Jack Russell Mix - he likes to chew pillows and blankets, uh oh!

This is a baby quail - it is only the size of a bumble bee

This is Guido and Polka riding around in a truck!

Our Bulletin Board

We made our bulletin board this month an advertisement for our Blog! We want to make sure that everyone is following along with us :-)

We made a fuzzy chick to put in the middle of our bulletin board!