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. We cracked open an egg to identify the parts inside the egg. The white/clear part of the egg is called the albumen. There is a thin membrane-like string that connects the yolk to the top and bottom of the egg called the chalaza. On the yolk there is the germinal disk, which becomes the chicken in a fertilized egg. The yolk is what a developing chick eats while they are growing in the egg.
In garden kitchen, we made parfaits! We made our own granola using oats and sunflower seeds. 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.
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.
We made suet cakes for birds using corn kernels, ground corn, sunflower seeds, and vegetable shortening. Suet cakes are great to feed birds in the fall or winter because they provide a high amount of calories to maintain body heat and energy.
We went on a bird hike in the arboretum. To help identify birds that we might see or hear, we brought along iPads with programs to learn more about the birds. The orange group had a barn swallow that answered their iPad’s call. They also saw a beautiful gold finch
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. We learned how garlic grows. You can plant each clove and from that clove a whole new head of garlic will sprout! We picked our beans that we would put in our soup fresh from the garden.
Garden Kitchen Recipes
Granola:
- Old fashioned oats
- quick oats
- drizzle olive oil
- maple syrup
- sprinkle cinnamon
Combine all ingredients and bake until they are crunchy.