Everywhere a chick-chick

“I didn’t know if the eggs were all fertile because I got them from a farm,” Ms. Shiever said. “Every day, I had about 150 kids stopping at the window saying, ‘Do we have anything yet?’ and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, if some don’t hatch, they’re going to be so disappointed.’ I’m lucky we had a really nice healthy batch.”

Orange Inclusive Preschool Principal Christine Goudy is pleased that Ms. Shiever took the initiative with the project.

Her students even started calling her “Miss Amy, the egg mom.”

The eggs came from Party at the Barn, a farm in Aurora with a petting zoo that hosts birthday parties and field trips. The Parent-Teacher Association donated the funds for an incubator.

“It’s been something that I’ve been wanting to do for years, but Amy came along and hit the ground running with it,” said Mrs. Goudy.

The reason she wanted to do it, she explained, was because she used to do it with her dad when she was little.

“It was an experience that I would never forget, and I wanted the kids to have that same experience,” said Ms. Goudy.

During the 20-day incubation period of the egg-centered curriculum, the students made labels such as “incubator” and displayed signs outside of the chicken habitat with instructions such as “keep the eggs safe and warm.”

The children learned about and drew the life cycle of a chicken.

“We used this shared experience to support both the language and literacy standards and the science standards. This type of active and hands-on learning boosts engagement and supports asking questions and making observations,” Ms. Shiever wrote.

“We have so many excited students checking in on the eggs every morning.”

Once the chicks hatched, students made signs inviting the kindergarten class to come see them. They hung up a sign outside and included a QR code that linked to the project website.

“They wrote letters to their kindergarten counterparts on a big piece of paper that said, ‘We’re hatching chicks. Do you want to see?’ They’re trying to understand now that print carries messages. It could be labels such as ‘incubator,’ it could be a sentence or a letter,” Ms. Shiever said.

She admitted that the first 20 days of the project were somewhat boring for the students.

“The kids would observe (the incubator) every time they came to school and left. It was quite boring because really, nothing happened. But now, this is super exciting for them,” she said.

Not only parents, but the school’s whole administrative team were huddled around the newly hatched chicks last week.

The students’ website, “Preschool Hatchlings” was a way for the public to interact. A Google Poll on the website invited parents and those in the Orange community to vote for names for the chicks from a list of names thought up by the students.

“We put a vote up at our local Heinen’s here at Lander Circle, at our library across the street, and at all the school buildings. We took it to Miles Market. We allowed parents to vote, and we had about 110 people vote,” Ms. Shiever said.

The top three names were “Bulldozer,” “Pancake,” and “Popcorn,” in that order.

The first-place name was given to the first chick that hatched, a jet-black chick with little spatial awareness which pecked the other newly hatched birds.

“It was a fitting name,” Ms. Shiever remarked.

The preschoolers’ opinions of the first-place name “Bulldozer” were also overwhelmingly positive.

When Abigail McCandless’s preschool class was asked if they liked the winning name choice, they yelled, “Yeah!’ in unison.

However, there were some creative differences. After this initial question, the students expressed what they would have liked the name to be. One preferred “Excavator” and another wanted “Chicky Chick.” One who liked Star Wars wanted “Kenobi.”

Now that the students have seen the chicks hatch, Ms. Shiever is returning the chicks to Party at the Barn. Photos of them, and the students’ “hatchling scrapbook,” are posted on their website.

“It’s just been an amazing thing. It’s been a really cool experience for our kids and our community. I think we’re going to do this every year and build it into our curriculum with the life cycle,” Mrs. Goudy said.