Follow a classroom of kindergartners as they participate in a popular activity: hatching chicks. Readers learn about the life cycle of a chicken, incubating eggs, watching them hatch, and raising the chicks until they are old enough to return to the chicken coop.
Caroline Arnold's simple text and close-up photographs are instructive and adorable.
Winner of the Cybils Award for Elementary Nonfiction
Arnold captures the joy and mystery of this familiar unit of study -- Kirkus Reviews
Readers will come away with a good understanding of chickens' origins -- Booklist
An excellent addition to studies of animals, life cycles, or agriculture, as well as an excellent mentor text for the genre of photo essay and stories of classroom life. -- SLJ's Classroom Bookshelf Blog
Simple yet fascinating. It's like getting to visit a classroom as they learn about the life cycle of chickens. How interesting it must be to watch a live creature come out off an egg!
The book includes photos. I appreciated the questions and glossary at the end.
Follow along as Mrs. Best brings eggs from home to an incubator in her elementary school classroom. Hatching Chicks in Room 6 has an easy-to-follow narrative with built-in drama as Mrs. Best’s students watch and wait for the baby chicks to emerge from the eggs they carefully incubate. Caroline Arnold’s photos are great as they capture the students’ enthusiasm and what seems to be expressiveness from the baby chicks. (If a photographer can show expressiveness in a chicken of any age, something good is going on.) Although there is necessarily some challenging vocabulary here (incubator and albumen, for example), the words are explained well and are not overwhelming. Once readers know the words, they will likely incorporate them into their own language when discussing this book or its subjects.
This brings out my inner child. I got really excited when I learned that chicks take 21 days to hatch and I got all giddy over counting down the days. A part of me thinks I did something like this in elementary school, but I can't remember any details of actually doing it. Maybe it was just a fantasy. I think all kindergarteners should get to hatch eggs.
There was a time in my early teens when I cried over a cracked egg and thought I had murdered some chick’s chance at life. Luckily, the end of the book has a Q&A section where it mentions that most of the eggs you buy in the store are not fertilized and will never make a chick, even if incubated. That will help others like me.
This book gets extra credit for exceeding expectations. I expected a bit of a slog as I was dragged along through watching kids watching eggs hatch, but the text and the lovely photographs did a great job of both showing the process and showing kids excited about learning. A great book about chickens and about learning through experience.
Very good book about the process of hatching chickens. It brought out questions for adults that should know the answer but didn't.. so thanks for answering our questions without making adult feel stupid and not making us use google search.
Great book as a prelude for classrooms hatching chickens or anyone studying life cycles. Engaging photographs and "eggcellent" sidebar info (sidebar text is overlaid on an egg).
Picture book non-fiction. Photographs show a Kindergarten classroom and describe the class's study of incubating chicken eggs and hatching chicks. Excellent tie-in with annual 1st grade science unit.
A detailed account of a classroom that watched the process of chicks hatching. Real pictures of their experiences and extra information on each page that you can read.
Not really a read aloud, but I still enjoyed this book and will be sharing it. All of my friends know of my newfound love for chickens, but I really like the way this book takes kids through the life cycle in a classroom setting. I haven't met a child who isn't fascinated by this, so I expect this book to be popular.
The perfect book for all those many classrooms that hatch chicks as part of their science curriculum. Very good information on the chicken AND the egg ;-) Photographs are excellent and well chosen to illustrate the text and there is plenty of helpful back matter.
Fun to read whether part of a hatching project or not.
Readers will learn about chicken development along with Mrs. Best's kindergarten class as they incubate chicken eggs, watch them hatch, and observe how the chicks develop and grow. Interesting and informative with detailed photographs that will hold young readers' attention. Includes an FAQ, glossary, and recommended websites and other resources for more information. Great introduction to the lifecycle of chickens!
This will be a go to book for the kindergarten teachers in my building. Wonderful photographs and engaging information about hatching chicks in a classroom.
Caroline Arnold is a go-to author for me because her writing for children is always clear and cohesive. In this book, Arnold includes a narrative of a class engaged in incubating chicken eggs and then taking care of the chicks along with non-narrative details - in captions and so forth - that provide information about the development of chicks, the physical features of chickens, the parts and purposes of an incubator, materials required to take care of chicks, the care of chicks and so forth. There are also helpful author notes at the end. The layout and design of the book is kid-friendly and the format lends itself to being read aloud and then placed in the classroom library for further perusal.
I was worried about whether Arnold would discuss the importance of the chicks having a home beyond the classroom - this was not an issue. The teacher, Mrs. Best, raises chickens at home and took the chicks back to her house at the appropriate time.
Follow a classroom of kindergartners as they participate in a popular activity- hatching chicks. Readers learn about the life cycle of a chicken, incubating eggs, watching them hatch, and raising the chicks until they are old enough to return to the chicken coop. Caroline Arnold's simple text and close-up photographs are instructive and adorable.
Notes Caroline Arnold is the author of more than one hundred books for children, most of them about science and nature. Recent titles include Living Fossils: Clues to the Past, Too Hot? Too Cold? Keeping Body Temperature Just Right, and A Warmer World . Caroline lives in Los Angeles, California.