A Microfarming Update

Five sleeping chicks!

This week we started to study nutrition and its relationship to us and to farming. Students watched a segment of a documentary called “What’s On Your Plate?” – a documentary created by two inner city New York elementary school girls. The girls in the documentary were determined to understand how the food on farms outside of the city tasted so much better than the food that they could acquire at their local markets. In response to the video, the third graders compiled a list of their own questions about health and nutrition. We wondered about our own health concerns and the concerns of people in the United States as a whole, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Now, we are looking in detail at the foods we eat every day. Students are dissecting nutrition labels on their foods to determine the ingredients, caloric intake, serving size, and nutritional value. Using our own food labels, we will discuss and create food pyramids to understand how to make healthy food and exercise choices in our own lives.

Look at the feather development early in the week.

We are keeping journals about the chicks. We are recording the new information we are learning about the chicks and the observations we are making. In Technology today we were able to type and post some of our thoughts onto this blog. We're very excited to share these entries with you. Please feel free to comment on them! We will continue to learn about communicating in this way.

Read the captions of the photos below to get more information about what we've been learning about our chicks. 

Their first trip to the large sheet covered wading pool.

A great photo of their wing and tail feather development.

There is a slight parting of the feathers on top of their heads. This is the beginning of their combs forming.

With new feathers come new talents. They are all flying around more.

One chick was often seen sleeping away from the others. We wanted to know if is was the same chick every time, so in Science class we put different colored markers on their heads. Now we are charting their movements by writing every hour the location of each chick (identified by her color) on a chart. We are trying to see if we notice the beginning of a pecking order - the hierarchy of the flock. We'll let you know if the same chick is off by herself. 

The chicks trying out cracker crumbs.