Room 3’s Living Eggs!  

Day 1: The eggs arrived! Our Living Eggs Person (named Jo) brought in our incubator, hatchling pen, food, food dish, water dish, wood shavings, poster sand more. We were very excited. She said that chicks take about 21 days to hatch so she had sped the process up and kept the chicks at her house for 19 days. Jo said that the heat of a mother hen was around 37.7 degrees, so we set the incubator to 37.7 degrees. She said that the chicks should start chipping the egg to get out on day 2. A couple of the eggs rolled around a bit. Jo gave us a lightbulb to put in the hatchling pen so that the chicks wouldn’t be too warm or too cold. We found out that if the chicks were in the pen huddled up around the lightbulb they were too cold, so put a towel over the top of the pen. If they were crowding around the other side, as far away as they could from the light, they were hot, so switch the light off for a bit. If they were spread around the pen evenly, they were the right temperature.

Day 2: The middle egg started to crack, it made a small chip in the shell. From the crack in the egg we could tell that the egg (chick) was in the stage of ‘piping’. We were all very excited! From the crack we could see a little a little flap that was moving because the chick was breathing! The other eggs didn’t have any cracks in them unfortunately, but they did keep rolling around and vibrating.After morning tea, some people could even hear the chick with the cracked shell chirping a bit!

Day 3: When we came in in the morning we got a big surprise! Four of the eggs had hatched! Lots of visitors from other rooms all came to see the eggs, at first there weren’t a lot of visitors, but then there were a lot of visitors. In fact about 6 whole classes came to visit our chicks! Wow, they must be really popular! Each time a class came, our ‘Egg - Bassadors’ talked to the classes and told them facts. First we had a lot of Junior classes then we had some senior classes. For the first two classes, they got a special treat, they got to see a chick hatching! After doing cross country, we found out that the newborn chick had a bit of eggshell stuck to it’s tail! Luckily, it got taken off. We now have 6 chickens in our big blue box!

Day 4: Two eggs that were in the incubator yesterday still didn’t hatch today. When we came in the morning we were all very disappointed that the two eggs didn’t hatch. But, at least the other eggs had hatched. We also gave the 8 chicks that had hatched names. They were called:  Sugar - Plum, Becca, Linda, Pecky, Chicky, Egg, (girls) T.J.L and Sir Eggmund Hillary (boys). The chicks also started to eat a lot more and drink a lot more.

Extra Information

• We started a roster to clean out the cage
• We were given 3 posters and we are learning all about the chicks before they hatch so when they hatch we know how to care all about them
• We have set up their new home so when two of them hatch we will have a place for them to live
• We still have to eggs

Pictures

                 

                         Life cycle of a hen

This is a collage of four of our chicks

Extra Facts

• The boys are light yellow and the girls are light brown
• Two more chicks have hatched
• We helped one more chick because it was still stuck to the yolk and hadn’t finished the process of absorbing the yolk