Chicks, Man!

Every Spring, one of my coworkers always hatches chickens so that students can study the life cycle of a chick to tie in with our science curriculum on animals.  It never occurred to me that I can have my own incubator and hatch eggs for my students.  This year, my friend was able to get an incubator for me from another teacher who wasn't going to use it so I just had to pay for the fertilized eggs and we're hatching eggs!!  We just put them in the incubator on April 26th so they are set to make their debut  on Open House which is May 17th.  EEEK!!!!  The kids were SOOOO excited about it and as soon as I told them what we were going to do, they squealed with delight and had to tell their parents!!  Some parents thought we already had chicks in our classroom.

The empty incubator

 The incubator with 21 brown eggs and 21 white eggs

I searched on TpT to see if there were any good activities on chickens and I came upon this great set from Christie from First Grade Fever.  All of her activities are so appropriate for my first graders and I love the can, have, are thinking map, the story she wrote, and all of the reproducibles.  

 One of the best things is the Egg Journal which we will be using to keep track of our egg observation.  We wrote and drew how many eggs we put in the incubator.

 How cute is that?!

 My favorite one-- she even drew the thermometer!

Then we made predictions about how many of the eggs would hatch.  I told the kids that not all the eggs would hatch but some kids still thought that most of the eggs would hatch.

 A little more realistic...

 This little girl has a lot of faith!

 We also did this sort of oviparous and viviparous animals which I found from Kindergarten Hoppenings.  Then the kids did their own sort.  They did such a great job!  So many exciting things going on in Room 46!!!

Something to make you laugh... I wonder where he lives... ;)

I hope everyone is having a great week!

Sorry for the lack of posts!

I can't believe a month has passed since my last post!  It's been CRAZY here.. (as all of you can attest!)  We have about 39 days of school left (I think!) and a lot of learning to be done.  I love TpT and stalking blogs but with lesson planning, grading papers, and "life"-- I have just fallen behind.  I will try to come up with more original units and lessons for TpT.  There's so many wonderful units/lessons out there already that I don't feel like making another spring unit that looks the same (besides-- the ones already on TpT are so fabulous already!!!)  My creative juices are not flowing too well.  Hopefully the summer will be a much better time for my creativity to flow.  Here are the last few weeks in pictures...

My students love using their Lakeshore mini whiteboards to practice words during small group reading.

We learned about health and worked on the curriculum that was sent to us through the American Dairy Council.

One of the best assemblies we ever had in my 13 years of teaching-- fun, engaging, and full of learning.

 My kids loved this part when the storyteller went inside the balloon.

Lovely piles of papers to grade.  I realize if I don't grade things every day, it piles up and then I don't even want to look at it.!

We had out annual field trip to the tide pools.  The ranger always does such a great job!  We love it.  The kids get to learn about tide pool animals.  Then they get to go explore the tide pools.

Our school received the CA Distinguished Schools Award so we took an all school picture.  Imagine getting 900 students all lined up for a picture.   

The photographer went in this to take the picture.  I don't know if you could pay me to get in one of those.  He also was responsible for getting himself up and down from there.  I saw the little basket shaking.  ::shudders::

I love these flowers-- anemones-- did you know that they close up in the dark and open back up in light?

 macarons... have you tried these??

 beautiful clouds...

 a way to sass up my classroom with this tape dispenser...

Spring break came and went-- it was a great time of rest!  I felt rested and ready to come back.  Hopefully I'll have some more exciting lessons and projects to share in the future.  Hope y'all are doing well!