Hello peppers!
Today was chicken day! We learned all about chickens, like about eggs and what they eat. Chickens use their crop to chew their food because they don’t have teeth. The food sits in the crop for up to 12 hours, where enzymes and a grinding motion break the food up. Sometimes when the crop is full, it can be felt on the chicken.
We saw what chickens ate and then each got to take a turn holding the chicken. The peppers learned that a female chicken is called a hen and a male chicken is called a rooster. When chickens are young you can tell if it is going to be a rooster or a hen by whether its back feathers are even with its front feathers. If they’re all even, then it’s female, if they’re not then it’s male. Chickens lay eggs about every 25 hours, which means we get about 6 eggs per week from a chicken.
In garden kitchen, we made parfaits! We made our own granola and used our dried fruit that we put in the dehydrator yesterday. The parfaits showed the layers just like the ground has layers. The chickens like to dig in the layers to eat the worms and other bugs. While we enjoyed our parfaits, Ms. Mandy showed us how to make yogurt and we began the process of making our own yogurt.
We went on a bird hike in the woods. To help identify birds that we might see or hear, we brought along iPads with programs to learn more about the birds. The red peppers correctly identified a crow just from hearing it’s call then comparing it to the iPad. The orange group had a robin that answered their iPad’s call.
Since we learned that chickens distribute their eggs evenly in their nest, we made nests to demonstrate how safe they are for holding the eggs. We used things we found in the garden and around Tollgate, along with some mud to hold everything together, to make the nests. We looked at a real bird’s nest and brainstormed some features that it had to make our nests safer for an egg. When the nests are all dry, they will be tested by dropping them from a wagon, to see if the egg inside survives the drop.
During music, we learned a Tollgate song and a few other songs. Alicia played guitar for us while we sang along to the songs. We sang a ruminant song to learn a little bit about the stomach before we learned about it during ruminant day.
In afternoon garden kitchen, we made seed soup. We used onion, corn, carrots, garlic, and herbs in our soup. This was to represent different seeds that chickens eat.
Tomorrow will be an exciting day learning about ruminants!
Garden Kitchen Recipes
Granola:
Old fashioned oats
quick oats
drizzle olive oil
maple syrup
sprinkle cinnamon