Baby Chicks!

We are very excited about what has been happening in our Kindergarten classroom over the last few weeks. We hatched baby chicks!!! Our class has learned everything about the life cycle of a chick and know how baby chicks are born.

A chick is a bird. It is oviparous. This means it is an animal that comes out of an egg. It takes a hen and a rooster to make a baby chick. The mother hen lays the eggs. Then, she sits on the eggs to keep them warm. Also, the mother turns the eggs every once in a while. We did not have a hen in our classroom. We had an incubator to keep our eggs warm. We kept the temperature at 99.5 degrees. The incubator also turned the eggs just like the mother hen would do.

It takes 21 days for a chick to hatch. There is a lot going on inside the egg while the chick is growing. The baby chick eats the yolk inside the egg to grow. The baby chick has to breathe air from the outside of the egg. There are tiny holes in the egg shell. The air from outside the egg travels through the shell and through tiny blood vessels connected to the chick. This is how the chick breathes. The chick grows and grows inside the egg. The chick grows a brain, a heart, legs, a beak with an egg tooth on the end, a body and wings. This is what happened to our baby chicks in our classroom.

After 21 days it is time for the baby chicks to start hatching. The chick has an egg tooth on the end of it's beak. It uses this egg tooth to break a tiny hole in the hard shell. The chick breaks a straight line in the egg. Then, it uses it's strong legs to push the shell off. When the chicks falls out of it's egg, it is exhausted. The chick will lay down and rest. The chick's down is very wet when it comes out of it's shell. The down will dry after a few minutes. The chick will grow adult feathers and will lose it's egg tooth in just a few days. We got to watch a baby chick hatch right out of it's egg!!

We learned that it takes about 6 months until a baby chick becomes an adult. Then, it is either a hen or a rooster.

In our classroom, we had 10 baby chicks. We really enjoyed holding them, petting them and listening to them chirp during the day. Our chicks are were cute! This was such an awesome experience that we will remember forever!! We love Kindergarten and we love our baby chicks!!