Nestled in our warm, humid still-air incubator are 4 chicken eggs. 2 of the eggs are Ameraucana. And the other 2 are Buff-Orpington. We think. Perhaps the 2 pale bluish eggs are Araucana. We're new at "chickens" and our eggs came from my Mom's friend who has MANY species of chickens. And, well, we just grabbed what was freshly laid. Either way, we're hoping for 4 little, fluffy, cheeping chicks in about 15 days.
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| Our Eggs |
So, our textbook Science studies have been postponed while we learn about incubating chicken eggs. This week we carefully monitored our incubator's temperature (which should be average 100 degrees), humidity (which should be around 50%) and turned our eggs 4-6 times per day (so the developing embryos won't stick to one side of the egg).
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| Our OLD Stryofoam Still-Air Incubator |
And we completed several notebooking pages with notes and diagrams from
Your Chicken: A Kid's Guide to Raising and Showing by Gail Damerow. (Oh, and we have no plans to SHOW any chicken that should hatch.) We studied hen anatomy and how eggs are formed, parts of an egg and embryo development.
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| J's Recording Sheet |
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| C's Classifciation and Anatomy Notebook Page |
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| S's Reproductive Anatomy and Egg Formation Page |
Sites to Check Out for Information and Projects
Hen Reproductive Anatomy (for older students)
You Tube: Chickens Mating (preview to see if appropriate for your student)
You Tube: Chicken Laying an Egg (preview to see if appropriate for your student)
All About Chickens at Enchanted Learning
Free Chicken Lapbook from Homeschoolshare
Eggology - Interactive Egg Anatomy
Stages of Chick Embryo Development
Guess-the-Embryo (preview to see if appropriate for your student)
oh how fun!!! we totally wanted to do eggs for 4H when we lived in KS. maybe we can do that here?? can't wait to see them hatch!!
ReplyDeleteBlogger is giving me a hard time, I hope it doesn't post this multiple times..
ReplyDeleteVery very neat!! I'll send a link to my kids too, we'll be following your chicken journey - and who knows, maybe we'll do chickens one day too :)
Thanks for the great info about chickens! My kids, especially my daughter, are a bit chicken-crazy at the moment. She fell in love with the chickens at my aunt's house, and she would so LOVE to hatch them here--but we can't. So we'll have to watch your blog for updates!
ReplyDeleteWhat a cool project. I wish we could do something like this. Oh well, I'll just read about you doing it. Thanks! :)
ReplyDeleteThis is a cool project. We have wild chickens that come in our yard. I never thought to do a nature study on them. Thanks for the idea!
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