Chicks hatch in classroom as students get hands-on learning

Grade 1 and 2 students at Immanuel Christian School in Charlottetown are getting first-hand experience with how farm animals eat, sleep, breath, move and play.

They visited Hogeterp Dairy Farm and Island Hill Farm to learn how animals live there. It's all part of a class project called How Do Farm Animals Live? 

Teacher Loretta Anderson partnered with a local farmer who brought an incubator filled with fertilized eggs into her classroom.

It was a way to bring the farm experience to school and for 21 days the students have been caring for the eggs, waiting to see them hatch.

"Every day we talked about our eggs and what was going on in those eggs. We looked at them and we watched them and of course the first 20 days weren't too exciting because they're just eggs but we talked about how to properly care for them, what a hen would do," Anderson said.

"Through those 21 days we learned what was going on inside that egg and how the egg was developing into a chick and today we've been watching how they hatch."

'Just part of living'

The class kept a close eye on the incubator's temperature and humidity level and watched as the eggs were gently rocked back and forth.

"I tell them right from the beginning that the only way the eggs will hatch is if we take good care of them and do what we need to do. And even then, they might not hatch because maybe they weren't fertilized, maybe something went wrong," Anderson said.

"So we just talk about how not everything is perfect and how things sometimes do die and that death is part of our life here on Earth. So we openly talk about death and that it's okay and I think they get it, they understand that that's just part of living."

The students quickly became a class full of mother hens, carefully nurturing their eggs and waiting for the moment they would meet their chicks.

"They came in this morning very excited. Most of them ran in without doing anything else because they knew today was the day," she said.

"And the fact that there were 12 already hatched was even better because we knew that we had taken good care of our eggs and they were hatching. So we were pretty happy about that."

'Really soggy'

Grade 2 student Tyce Arendse was delighted to see the chicks pecking free from their shells.

"I think they're adorable. Right now they're really soggy, I just watched one crack open," he said. "It started pecking at it and then it popped out and then it made a little line and then it kicked it and it opened and started crawling out."

Grade 2 student Isaiah Giordani learned a lot about how eggs develop into chicks.

"If it's a big egg it could be a double yolk but you can't have twin chicks if it's a double yolk," he said, adding that's because the chick uses the yolk to grow. "And on the second day the heart forms and begins to beat already."

Isaiah was impressed by the determination and co-operation it took for the chicks to hatch.

"These chicks, I'm pretty sure they would hatch out of an egg quicker than I would," he said with a laugh. "But if they're having trouble getting out and they can't get out on their own, some of their brothers and sisters or other little chicks that have already hatched will help them."

'I want to name him S'more'

Anderson loves seeing the connection the chicks make with the children.

"The already-hatched chicks chirp and encourage them to keep going and even help them out and so that's neat for them to see that happen," she said.

"And they kind of saw it right away, I didn't even have to say anything, they said 'look at them helping each other' and that's actually what they're designed to do so that was a great learning experience too."

The class will care for the chicks all week. Grade 2 student Taysa Jorritsma is excited to read to her chick and build a him a comfortable cardboard home.

"You don't like squeeze them and you don't drop them or else that could hurt them a lot. And you don't drop them and you got to watch them and make sure they don't walk off your desk," she said. "I want a brown one and I want to name him S'more."

Anderson says her students have learned many lessons from this project and plans to continue it in the future.

"They've learned about nurturing, how to take care of something and in the next few days they'll learn that even more because they'll actually be allowed to hold them, touch them and pet them and they'll have to learn to be gentle with them because they're so young, they're very fragile," Anderson said. 

"So they'll learn lots of those lessons in the next few days as we take care of them until they go to their farm home."

The class plans to sell the chicks and use the money raised to buy a farm animal for a family in another part of the world.

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