I'm happy to announce that we have officially started our exploration of eggs and chicks! We had a lot going on this week so we didn't get to spend every day focusing our new study, but we were able to get the ball rolling. We're planning on spending the rest of the school year focusing on our eggs (only 3 more weeks!). We'll be spending that time working on some science experiments and doing a lot of research. It's safe to say that we'll be egg and chicken experts by the time summer comes around! Everyone seems really excited about it and we've been checking on our eggs every day.
To start off the week, we spent a lot of time with our books doing research. We researched in both large and small group settings. We read some books together and looked to answer some questions. We also spent some time in small groups doing picture walks. As with our other studies, we spent time after our picture walks talking together as a large group and asking questions. We've been learning a lot about the incubation process. We set our incubator up and got it warming on Monday. We set it to heat up around 100 degrees and then placed our eggs in on Tuesday. We've spent a lot of time talking about the importance of caring for our eggs. This means that the incubator can't be touched or bumped. The kids have been careful to look inside without touching. It's so sweet to see them peak in and check on the eggs. We have 12 eggs in there now so we're hoping to at least have a few chicks in about 3 weeks. They should hatch during the last week of school (we're guessing Tuesday or Wednesday).
Before placing our eggs in the incubator, we looked at them together and talked about the journey our eggs will go on. We mentioned that we got these eggs from a local farmer and the process that happens inside the egg. We were able to use some books to see an example of what the chicks look like inside the eggs at difference stages through out the 3 weeks of incubation. We also looked through one of our eggs with a flash light. We noticed that there was nothing inside but learned that hopefully next week we will be able to see a slight difference as a baby chick forms. We will be checking our eggs this way each week to see how they are developing and compare the difference in weeks. We also made a countdown calendar to hang up above our incubator. Each day a student gets to mark through another day on our calendar as we get closer to the eggs "due date". We have also put up a chicken board near our incubator. The kids have enjoyed looking through books and magazines to find chickens and eggs. If they find one in a magazine, they can cut it out and add it to our board. We're curious to see how many chickens we can notice each week! We have already learned so much about our chicks in just a week! I encourage you to ask the kids some questions about what they've learned. I've been amazed at how much information they have remembered already. The chicks are definitely the talk of the town in our little community classroom!
Aside from our eggs exploration, we were also able to go see a puppet show with the rest of the preschoolers this week. It was great! The school had a puppeteer from the Marionette Theater come to put on a performance about the dentist and taking care of our teeth. We learned how to brush our teeth and what is healthy for them. We also learned that a trip to the dentist isn't a scary thing. The dentist is there to help take care of us. The kids couldn't take their eyes off of the puppets...they seemed to really enjoy it!
We also had to make sure we spent some time celebrating our moms this week! We told the kids that we were making a special surprise and that they couldn't tell their mom what it was. I'm curious to know how many of them actually kept this little gift a secret :) We decided to make some mugs for our awesome moms! Each kid was given a mug and some sharpies. They were able to decorate it any way that they wanted to in order to make it special for their mom. After decorating them we baked them in the oven in order for the ink to stick. We learned that these are not dish washer safe so you'll have to be careful if you choose to use them. They turned out so cute...I hope you enjoy them! We're so thankful for all of the wonderful moms in our classroom! We hope your Mother's Day weekend is a wonderful, just like you!
Approaches to Learning:
- Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
- Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
- Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas
- Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
- Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
- Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
- Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.
- Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.
- Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects
- Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
- Recall some details in stories read aloud.
- Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
- Explore books independently.
- Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
- Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.
- Investigate solutions to simple problems.
- Locate patterns in the environment.
- Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
- Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
- Identify the positions first through tenth using concrete objects.
- Associate time concepts with a clock.
We're so excited about our eggs!!...
Enjoying our puppet show...
Happy Mother's Day!...
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