This week, Emily showed us what we need to do to take care of the chickens, which we’ll be doing all month. We’ll be feeding, watering, checking for eggs, and making sure they’re happy, healthy, and warm… twice a day, all month long!  This is important work, especially since we use eggs in our baking every week.  Learning how to care for animals is an important skill we teach at TVCS.  We are learning how to talk to and approach the chickens and how to handle them carefully.  We are learning how to know if they are afraid, happy, healthy, or sick, based on how they move their bodies or how they communicate with noises. We even learned to exercise like a chicken…ask your child to show you! 

Emily also helped us plant wheat and barley. When we tried before, the seeds grew mold.  Now that we are using soil, perhaps we will be able to grow real wheat and barley grass!

This week, Leslie Heinemann brought in a part of her bee hive to show us. Now we know where honey comes from!  She showed us how the bees make the honey comb in the hive and where they live. She also showed us how the queen bee is added with a special box that is sealed with candy that the other bees eat through to release her into the hive. We even tried some of the honey they have collected from the bees…delicious!

Our wheat and barley are growing! They have sprouted and are getting taller by the day. We were wondering if the chickens would like this new treat… turns out they do! We’ll keep our sprouts growing by giving them water, sun, and air, and trim a few to give to the chickens each day as a special treat.  

We have a new classroom pet: worms!  We now have a vermiculture bin in our classroom!  We prepared the “worm house” and greeted our new friends with kind words and gentle handling. Our new pet worms will eat our food scraps all winter and produce rich soil that we can use for planting seeds in the spring.  They love coffee grounds, strawberries, bananas, grapes and bread, so feel free to bring in some of those items cut up very small to feed to our worms. We made a sign for everyone to read which shares what worms like to eat and what they don’t like to eat. We love our wiggly new friends!