How We Put Our Learning To Good Use!

The class had a mysterious piece of equipment awaiting them in the classroom this morning!  We took some time to make some scientific guesses in our journals and then Mrs. Koehn revealed that we are going to be incubating chicken eggs!  We are so excited to learn about the life cycle of a chicken with this hands-on science experiment.

None of us, as it turns out, has ever done this before (although Kara and Ana do have baby chicks at their houses right now!)  We weren't sure what to do.  We started by making a KWL chart (What do we already KNOW, what do we WANT to know and what did we LEARN?)

It turns out, we didn't know a lot.  

There seemed to be a lot of questions and details we needed to know before we got started. 

We decided to consult some books.

This one looked very promising.  With a chick on the front cover, we thought it would be pretty useful, but it turns out, there weren't many details about how to incubate eggs.  

We looked at this book next. We looked at the title and the pictures on the cover to see if it might answer some of our questions.  We thought it was worth a look inside. 

We used the Table of Contents to find what we were looking for.  (Eggs, page 100). 

This page had a lot of information about collecting eggs and the colors of eggs, but nothing about incubating eggs.  We decided to use another feature of nonfiction texts, the INDEX!!

Sure enough, the index had what we were looking for!  Incubation on pages 68, 70 and 71!

The picture on page 69 sure looked like we might be in the right place!

We used the heading on the page to confirm that this page was probably full of answers for us! 

Sure enough, we learned what temperature the incubator has to be set at, how many days to incubate and that we need to turn the eggs 2-3 times a day (Mrs. Koehn isn't too happy about that last bit - at least not for the weekends!)

We loved using what we have learned about nonfiction texts to find answers to our questions!  We can't wait to read more about chicks and chickens!

P.S. If anyone is interested in having any of our chicks that hatch (we are putting 12 in the incubator, no guarantees that any will hatch), please let Mrs. Koehn know!  We will be looking for homes for our chicks around May 7-8th!