Learning and Teaching in Prep PR

Chick Hatching Experience

The Preps have had a very exciting start to Term 3!  

As an immersion for our new Inquiry unit - ‘The Right Balance’, we witnessed the beginning of a life cycle in action by observing the hatching and growth of chicks for two weeks.

‘Animals on the Farm’ provided us with 2 one-day old chicks and 8 eggs, as well as all the necessary equipment for our Chick Hatching experience, such as an incubator for our eggs, chick food, and a Chick Box containing wood shavings and two light globes to keep our chicks warm. 

Upon arrival, we named the 2 one-day old chicks - Mohawk (Mo for short) and Daisy.  We loved their different personalities and it was great to see them grow and change over the two weeks.  By the end of our Chick Hatching experience, Mo and Daisy had grown quite big and had already started growing their adult white feathers.

We were very fortunate that 7 out of our 8 eggs were fertilised and we were so excited to observe the chicks using their egg tooth to hatch out of the eggs.  It was a slow process for each chick and they were very tired after breaking out of their eggshell.  The chicks came out wet and sticky, and had to remain in the incubator until they were stronger, dry and fluffy.  This took about 48 hours for each chick.

We loved having cuddles with the chicks each day and watching them grow.  We read lots of great books from our library about Chickens, and have learnt many interesting facts about chickens and their life cycle.

Each day, we recorded our observations and findings in our Chick Diary. 

The Preps are doing an AMAZING job with their writing skills, particularly the way we are stretching out sounds in order to spell words and remembering to use capital letters, full stops and finger spaces correctly in our writing.  We’ve just started using dotted thirds lines and are keen to keep practising the correct letter formation on these lines.  

Check it out!

We also had fun merging our learning about 2D shapes in Maths with our interest in the chicks.  Take a look at the collages of chicks we have made using 2D shapes!