What is the benefit of having chickens be a part of the school experience?
Students can learn a lot through taking care of chickens! The knowledge they acquire is cross-curricular and will stay with them for a lifetime as it is an authentic learning experience.
Each day our students work in different crews, for their crew jobs. The jobs are an important component to the functioning of our school and students are learning responsibility in the process. This blog post will explain the Chicken Crew.
Each crew starts by getting their handy clipboard and checklist! This really helps the kiddo's to be leaders of the crews.
Students on Chicken Crew are responsible for feeding and watering the chickens.
Our hens get pellets, scratch and scraps.
Scraps from lunch and snack are saved in these cute tin buckets and given to the hens each morning.
Making sure the chickens have clean water every day is very important. This is a task that requires team work and cooperation as the watering cans are very heavy when they are full!
They also collect, wash and log eggs . The eggs are sold for three dollars a dozen and the money is managed by the students.
Sometimes we find them in silly places!
This little lady thought this was a great place to lay an egg! One of the tasks of chicken crew is to make and note observations about the chickens. Finding an egg in an unusual place would be something they would note.
Once the eggs are inside they are washed and left out to dry.
After the eggs are dry they are placed in cartons to be sold and placed in the fridge.
When the eggs are washed they are logged and graphed by color and the time of day is noted.
Our chicken store manager (a student that had to apply for the position) keeps track of the transactions. Eggs purchased, feed purchased and any supplies are all tracked here.
We recently purchased thirteen new chicks! The kids are in love with them and enjoy spending time with them on their lunch break. Chicken crew also checks the nesting boxes for eggs during lunch and logs the data at that time as well.
It is a lot of fun having chickens at school and the students are making observations, connections, gaining a sense of responsibility and ownership.
