Real Work

Last month, we wrote about the children's growing desire for "real work", especially work that would allow them to use their muscles, engage their joints, challenge their kinesthetic sense, and, like all worthwhile work, give them a sense of accomplishment.
At first, we teachers started to make opportunities for this kind of work in our classroom space...

We added big, heavy, wooden blocks to our toy shelves for large-scale building...

...and filled bottles with interesting- and heavy- things, for lugging around, and adding to the structures that were built with the big blocks.

Of course, we all know that, this time of year, the one place where you can find an endless supply of work is outdoors! With all of the rain this spring, the grass on the playground has been shooting up like crazy!

This looks like a job for a bunch of three-year-olds, who have been ardently honing their scissor skills all winter!

We also had a big project in mind, that would require lots of help. A couple of years ago, a pink, plastic play-house mysteriously showed up on our playground. It turned out that a former student was clearing out a number of outgrown toys and thought that we could use it. Use it we did, until we realized that the Frogs had also outgrown the little pink house.

It was time for it to go in order to make way for bigger and better things!

"Oh no!!! The house got all blown down!!!" was the oft repeated, totally delighted reaction from the Frogs. the got right to work, hoisting the just-heavy-and-awkward-enough-to-be-exciting plastic chunks of house and working together to haul them all the way across the parking lot to the side of the building.

(By the way...does anybody want a slightly used, pink plastic playhouse?)

Now that we had all of this open space on the playground, we were excited to come up with some more opportunities for "real work" to do outside.

Here's where we finally wound up finding our inspiration;

Tuesday Market!!!

After hearing lots of talk from the kids about their gardens at home, and their visits to the various area farmer's markets, we decided to throw out a ball to see if they would run with it;

We set up a market area on the playground!

Their are lots of big jobs for the Frogs to do here! Filling pots with soil and water. Hauling flats of seedlings around the playground in wagons or by hand. Engaging in commerce, (pretend ice cream is the hottest selling item) and figuring out how to work together.

So far, the kids have been really into the idea! At first, they were mostly buying and selling seedlings and flowers. Now that the real farmer's market is starting to feature edible crops, we'll have to get some real produce in there!

Hooray for spring!

Nine!

Yesterday afternoon:

This morning:

Nine peeping chicks!

Look!!!!!

So, I had a post all ready that had absolutely nothing to do with eggs. Really, we have a lot of other things going on...
Then this happened;

...and not ten minutes later, this;

Wow! This little guy works fast!!!
I just peeked in the incubator, and it looks like yet another chick has hatched! They are both peeping away like crazy, almost loudly enough to wake up the napping Frogs. The reason they peep so loudly is to cue the other chicks to get on with hatching.
Should be an interesting morning tomorrow!

Wordless Wednesday: Sleepy Robins

Video: Egg Candling Day 8

We candled the chicken eggs again today, and were able to see a LOT more of what is going on inside. On Tuesday, we were able to faintly see the shadow of an embryo in about five of our eighteen eggs. Four of the eggs seemed to have nothing going on inside them, and the rest left us with a big question mark; we just couldn't tell what was going on.

What a difference three days makes! We were able to confirm that six of the eggs were indeed duds...

Nope. No chickens here.

...but the rest? All of them had something like this going on;

Did you catch that little shadow hopping around towards the bottom of the egg?

That's totally a chicken!!!

Now, keep in mind that the expression about not counting one's eggs until they hatch is there for a reason. We've had eggs that have seemed perfectly viable just not hatch, for no reason that we could figure out. We've been very careful to let the Frogs know that sometimes, the chicks just don't come out, even if we really, really want them to. As we said in the last post, a 50% hatch rate is about average for us in a good year, so if we get six chickens we'll be very lucky...

The final dozen.

..That said, twelve is a nice round number, so cross your fingers!

Robin Watch 2011: Day 15

Looks like all four eggs hatched!

Robin Watch: Day14/ Wordless Wednesdays

Egg-citement!!!*

First up, the Robin's Nest update:

Notice anything about that egg on the top, right hand side? No???

Look closer;

AAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!

At first, we thought that it had to be an accidental crack- there's no way that a whole entire being can be ready to hatch in such a short time. Well, according to the Internet, it's not only possible, it's normal! We'll post updates as the situation develops, provided Mama Robin can tolerate our nosey-ness!

Also, we spent the morning anxiously looking out for one of these;

Why? and how exactly does a UPS truck relate at all to eggs? Well, last week we ordered one of these, a fancy-pants egg candling device which was slated for delivery today! Now, if you saw last Wednesday's post, you got to see a few examples of how the Frogs have been exploring light and shadow. When you candle an egg, you use light and shadow to give you a sneak peek at the developing chicken embryo. (Or the empty egg as the case may be.)

I actually snapped this picture while I was on my coffee break downtown. The back was wide open and it took every ounce of my self control to resist climbing in and rifling through the boxes until I found it! It's a good thing i didn't, because when I got back to school, it was already there!!!

it turned out that our web cam didn't do a very good job of capturing images from the Ova-Scope, so we relied on our good friend, Mr. IPhone, to help us view the candled eggs. Here are a few pictures of our eggs at 5 days gestation:

This egg is beautiful with the light shining through it, but it shows no signs of embryonic development. This is not uncommon. In our experience, the average hatch rate of incubated eggs is about 50% or less. (We drew the star onto the outside of the shell to help us keep track of turning the eggs.)

See those veiny looking lines at the bottom of the egg? Those are a clear sign that, somewhere on the yolk of this egg is a little bunch of cells that are starting to grow into a chicken!

Same here! As we get further along the 21 day gestation period, we should be able to see the outline of the embryo itself. All of those veiny lines lead to the developing chick's umbilical cord, delivering nutrients from the yolk sac.

The kids are starting to make a lot of connections between concepts, thanks to this project. They have connected the eggs in the Robin's nest to the eggs in our incubator. They have also started to connect the waiting that comes along with this process to the waiting that many of them have gone through recently when they had new siblings come into their lives. (We've had 5 babies show up over the last 12 months!) At the beginning of this project, we asked "Were your babies ready to be born right away? Or, did you have to wait a for them to come out?" You could see the knowing looks cross their faces, as they all started talking about how it took a long, loooong time for those babies to come out.

It's funny, in years past, the Frogs have found the process of waiting 21 whole days for these chickens to come out to be a bit arduous. Somehow, I suspect that this time, it might be a tiny bit easier. 21 days goes by a lot quicker that 40 weeks!

(*Apoligies for the horrible pun. I just couldn't resist!)

Month-To-Month Mural: April

This Month, we were inspired by the process documented in this post over at Teacher Tom's Blog.

(That seems to happen a lot around here...)

These static pictures give you a basic idea about what materials we used and how we went about the whole project, but if you want to really understand our process, still photos just won't do;

We love it, but it still isn't done yet...