Well the happy news at circle time today was that we have EIGHT beautiful baby chickens to take care of. The sad news was that one chick died over the weekend. We took this life lesson opportunity to have a low key and informational talk about what it means to be dead: the chicken's heart stops beating, it's eyes won't open and it's body stopped working. We also talked about and the eleven eggs that have been sitting still through all that hatching and carrying on and that we thought were not going to hatch. We decided to take those eggs outside and crack them open to investigate how far the chickens were along, to examine their bodies up close and to perhaps guess what might have happened.
We also decided we would have a little chicken funeral for our departed feathered friends. All children were invited to come to the cracking and about half accepted. Within the first egg that number also halved until we had a group of about 9.
All but two of the eggs, which were pure liquid yolk, had some stage of chicken in them. Children were invited to examine the chickens as closely as they liked. Several children touched them.
We compared some of the different chickens and at Rachel, Anna's mom's, urging we got a couple of chicken books to look at the pictures while we worked.
One of the books brought upstairs was a book with several humorous and artistic interpretations to the question "Why did the chicken cross the road?" After placing the bodies in a small box, children gathered leaves from the courtyard and placed them on top. Then we had a spirited reading of some chicken jokes and it was time to head back inside. I guess all us chickens must cross that great road one day and today was a safe and gentle invitation for children to come close to some of life's great issues and questions. Now keep on cluckin....
