Tot School: Chick theme

Kent was 21 months old.

I found so many cute chick activities while searching for Easter ideas!  We raise a couple hundred chickens a year here, plus we have some laying hens wandering around.  Our first batch of day-old chicks arrived on April 5th.  We learned all about chicks and chickens that week!

I picked up this cool life cycle of a chicken set at the Chippewa Nature Center.  We used it as the basis for the week’s activities.  I put some white, yellow, and orange feathers in his sensory bin.  At first I added only the nest and eggs figurine.  We talked about eggs and decorated an egg coloring page.

Each day I added another figurine and talked to him about what it was.  Then we laid out each day’s coloring picture and matched up them up with the figurines.  We colored a hen on the fourth day and a rooster on the fifth day, even though the set only has one adult bird.  He recognized rooster, hen, etc. when we used those words but I explained that the rooster is the daddy, the hen is the mama, and the chick is the baby.  That made a big impression on him: now he always asks if an animal is a mama or daddy!

I made a chicken hand puppet in about 10 minutes with an old sock, felt, scissors, googly eyes, cardboard and hot glue.  I cut a hole in the end of the sock and put cardboard inside of it for the beak shape.  I was inspired by this tutorial.

My intent was for Kent to use the puppet and go around the house picking up pieces of “food”, i.e. balled up brown paper, with the beak.  The puppet was a little awkward for his small hands so instead he picked up the food and Brian or I grabbed it out of his hands with the puppet.  He thought this was hilarious and wanted to feed the chicken all week.  We had fun pecking at him. 😉

Additional activities:

• We used the This Little Chick printable activity to review colors.  We had two copies of the chicks, one cut out and one still together on pages.  I read the poem and asked him to help each bird find it’s friend of the same color.  The poem (in a singsong voice) really caught his interest.  We completed the matching a few times throughout the week – much more than we’ve done with plain matching cards.
• We did the disappearing egg shell experiment.  I poured the vinegar in the jar and had him drop the egg in.  He wasn’t very happy that he didn’t get to play with it more.  A couple days later I opened the jar and gave it to him to explore in the bathtub right before bath time.

Have you learned about any fun, different animals lately?

This post is linked to:
Tot School Gathering Place ~ Week 17

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