Hi all,
For those of you who don't know me personally, it's time to come clean about something :-). We own chickens, and we don't live on a farm. We actually live in a suburbanite neighborhood, and have discovered the joy of raising chickens!
Yep, you heard me right. How did this all start? Well, this city gal never realized that she had a farm girl lurking inside her (even though I've always loved animals and can be easily accused of having too many).
The children have always loved animals , so when they heard that one of our local farms was renting an incubator and providing fertilized eggs, they were all over the parents to hatch little chicks; being the sly mother that I am, I said "sure, as long as we can make it an educational process, and dad is ok with it"; thus began the science lesson on the life cycle of a chicken!
We started incubating our eggs and had baby chicks 21 days later! Yeah, it was so exciting! We incubated 18 eggs and had 9 chicks hatch, they were so incredibly cute! There were a few chicks that died within the first day, and that made darling daughter a little sad, but also served as a valuable teaching lesson on the natural process of death and animals (keep in mind, my children are tweens). Darling daughter has a very tender spirit when it comes to animals and small children, and is thinking about becoming a Doctor or Vet.
As the baby chicks grew, we became more and more attached to them and really did not want to take them back to the farm, but we also did not think we would be able to successfully raise them on our own. We prayed about it, counseled with dad (that means the children pleaded their case), and decided to keep 4 hens for egg production.
This has been a great chapter in discovering our world; the children learned a lot and we now have 4 chickens that are almost a year old, that lay eggs almost every single day (can we say yummy?).
If you are interested in learning more about the life cycle of a chicken, check out this site:
http://www.kidfarm.net (There is great information on this site, to include coloring pages for the younger ones.)
To learn about the incubation process, check out this site:
http://www.msstate.edu/dept/poultry/hatch.htm
(ok I was going to put pictures of the chickens up, but alas, I have to figure out why they won't upload, stay tuned)
). We started talking about the various questions and how to best answer them. I directed her to get some common household items she had and we did various experiments to solve the answers. She then says to me: Aunty this was so much fun. I hate science at school because all we do is read the textbook and take tests, we don't even have labs 
Since when have they done away with Science labs? The schools today are so busy teaching to the test that they have killed the love of learning!!!
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) to learning. We combine the concept of keeping lessons short, outside play, nature studies, living books, unit studies and lots of hands on projects, and Mom really tries to get a grip on reality that I don't have to make them do 8 hours a day of learning sequestered in a classroom in order for them to learn (no offense intended at all to those who choose to teach in that type of setting). 
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