Our Egg Exploration Continued...

Hello family and friends!

I can't believe we're wrapping up our last full week of the school year. I feel like the year has flown by! We're officially on the final countdown for our eggs this week. We've been keeping up with our calendar countdown and their hatch date is Tuesday. I'm hoping that they wait until that day instead of coming early so we can see them hatching! I'll send out an email with a picture when (if) they finally arrive (although I'm sure you'll hear all about it at home)! We spent this week continuing to explore our eggs and chickens. We'll continue to do the same next week as we anticipate their arrival.

To start our week, we focused on the life cycle of a chicken. We read several books that took us through the stages from egg to adult chicken. We discussed that chickens start as an egg. Once they hatch they're called chicks and stay with their mothers for several months. They are then called a pullet for their first full year. After that they are either a hen or rooster depending on their gender. The kids spent some time in books exploring this life cycle and then illustrated their own. They took their time drawing the details of each stage, including arrows that direct you through the process. We have these hanging up in the hallway above our lunch box wagon. Make sure you check them out!

Since we have been spending so much time over the past 3 weeks in non-fiction books, we decided to focus the majority of our week on fiction. We've been reading a lot of funny books about chickens and all the adventures they go on. As we've been reading, we've been talking about the importance of fiction books and using our imaginations. We've also been discussing the difference between fiction and non-fiction. We've talked about the different parts of a story and what it means to be both an author and an illustrator. Since we wrote a non-fiction book earlier this year about sea creatures, we thought it'd be fun to write our own fictional book. I really wanted this project to show the voice of each individual child. Because of that, I did not write up parts of the books with blanks for them to fill in like we did with our non-fiction book. This time we sat down with the kids one-on-one and either typed or handwrote their story. We did no editing on grammar or sentence structure. We just let the kids talk while we recorded it word for word. My only regret for this year is that we did not make more of theses books. They are fantastic! It was such an enjoyable experience for all of us as we wrote together. After typing up each story, the kids signed and illustrated their work. We also made a little paper plate chicken to go along with their story. They did all the cutting and drawing themselves! I love that each child went through different methods in creating the parts of their chicken. No two look alike! This whole process took us about 3 days to complete. After we finished them, the kids were able to present their story to their classmates. We read each story aloud. They were so very proud of themselves! We have laminated the stores and they're hanging up in the hallway along with their chickens. You have to read some...they're amazing!

Since we've learned so much about chickens and eggs over the past 3 weeks, we decided to see what others in our school knew about the subject. To do this, we conducted some surveys. Each students picked a question to ask. We discussed our questions, attached it to our clipboards, and walked around the school asking both students and teachers. After spending some time asking questions, we met back together and discussed our findings. We realized that we have learned a lot! This also gave us the opportunity to be a teacher to others about facts that we have learned. Here are some of the great survey questions that we came up with...

Ashton: Do roosters grow their comb before hens do?
Vedh: Do you know what a pullet is?
Kingston: Do you like chickens?
John Walter: Do you know what an egg tooth is?
Jacob: Do you know what a chicken wattle is?
David: Do you know what a chicken egg is?
Kifer: Do chickens eat worms?
John Adam: Are some chicks black?
Owen: Are some chicks yellow?
Zeke: Can chicks be black?

We have had so much fun with our egg exploration! I know it's going to be even more exciting next week when we have live chicks with us!

Approaches to Learning

Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
Reason about events, relationships, or problems.
Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
Try to solve problems encountered in play.

Social & Emotional

Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.
Participate in group life of class.
Demonstrate strategies to join play group with adult support.
Develop friendship with one or two preferred children.
Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.

Language & Literacy

Contribute to small group or whole class stories, rhymes or poems.
Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
Use drawings, letters, or words to create narratives about people and things in their environment.
Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
Describe events of personal significance.
Understand the relationship between print and pictures on page.
Progress in understanding how books are viewed.
Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts real aloud.

Mathematics

Organize and represent data with real objects.
Identify two dimensional shapes: circle, square, triangle and rectangle.
Recognize a simple pattern and extend.
Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.

We are experts! Exploring the life cycle of a chicken...