Capturing a Chicken's Stages of Life

In this lesson plan students experience the life cycle of chickens first hand. First my students and I set up an incubator in the classroom. Students took pictures of the various materials we needed and the steps taken to prepare the incubator. Next, we read and researched online about the importance of making sure the incubator stays at a constant temperature and that the humidity is controlled. Once our chicken eggs arrived, we placed them in the incubator. Again, students took pictures and recorded video clips of the process. Over the next 21 days or incubation, students learned how the chicks were growing inside the egg. Students participated in drawing and labeling the different stages of growth from inside the egg and scanning their pictures into the computer. Once the chicks began to hatch, students again took pictures and video to document the process. Students also wrote about the hatchng process, illustrated the writing, and scanned these pictures into the computer also. Our newly hatched chicks were soon taken out of the incubator and placed in a brooder. At this point students learned what would be needed in order to keep the baby chicks alive. Students documented the chick's habits and actions using the digital cameras. At the conclusion of this project, students were split into cooperative groups to create multi-media projects. Groups focused on one of the following: incubation set up, the incubator monitoring process, the development inside the egg, the hatching process, and the care of a chick after hatching. Each group used the pictures and video they had taking throughout the process along with their own illustrations that had been scanned in order to create a slide show. Students in each group took turns recording themselves reading sentences they wrote about their group's focus and added this audio to their slide shows. The end products were a type of "mini-movie" in which students displayed all they had learned about the life cycle of a chicken. These slide shows were then shared with other classes.