I’m so grateful to work in a private school. The rules are a little more relaxed than the public school system and we get to do more fun things than the other schools around us have even dreamed of! Case in point: this week we hatched chicks!! I’m still not sure who had more fun; teachers or students, but one thing is for sure, there was no lack of amazement this week.

On Monday morning one of our students’ parents brought in an incubator with 18 eggs in it. Our first lesson was in patience. The chicks were due to hatch on Thursday and that was three days away. The students peeked into the incubator for a couple minutes but when they saw nothing moving they continued about their day. Eggs that aren’t moving are not actually that exciting. Two full days passed by and we still had an incubator full of 18 eggs. I guess that is sort of a miracle in itself because we do have six classes of 3-5 year olds!

Wednesday morning is when the action started. Did you know that you can actually hear the chicks chirping through the shells? It was a little crazy to hear! I checked on the eggs right away in the morning and all I heard was chirping, no visible signs of an impending hatch so I walked down the hall to the bathroom and the next thing I know someone is yelling “it’s coming now!” By the time I got back to the incubator the first chick was part way out of it’s shell! Happy Birthday Sunny!

We ended up with seven total chicks on Wednesday and every student present that day got to see one hatch. We would lay on our bellies in front of the incubator for unknown amounts of time watching these chicks. If you’ve never seen a chick hatch, as most of us hadn’t, it really is something amazing to see. We talked about how the chick has an egg tooth to help them chip away at the shell. We witnessed the chicks cracking the eggs all the way around the end of the shell and then finally popping out. We watched the eggs roll around and listened to them chirp. We seen the chicks play with each other. We made many different observations about the hatching process and how the chick changes from wet and weak right after hatching to dry, fluffy and strong within a short amount of time. We even predicted how many eggs would actually hatch.

And we had the best quiet time of the year:

Having this experience was a blessing. Next week we will have the chicks in the sensory table for the children. Obviously this will require constant supervision but I cannot wait to see their faces when they finally get these little fluff balls in their hands!