A2 STEAM Chickens, The Beginning
There are lots of sad, fun and exciting stories about the chickens.
PHASE 1
During the summer of 2015 Mrs. Moore, Mr. Vince and Mrs. Johengen began planning a PBL project for us that would become a project that kids could keep doing for years to come. They decided they wanted to raise chickens!
Students started that fall by visiting farms, interviewing chicken ranchers and researching what made a good chicken coop. It was hard work and the students of STEAM took the challenge.
Students created 3D computer models of their ideas for chicken coops, they built 3D architectural models and even did watercolor renderings of their models!
During our Fall Expo that year, community members and fellow students voted on 21 different designs. Students were on the edge of their seat about what design would be chosen to be built that spring!
PHASE 2
Throughout the winter the we worked to cement our chicken coop design and make preparations for baby chicks!
We worked to build a brooder that would house our baby chicks once they hatched, and some students even designed a robot controlled egg turner for one of the incubators! We were hard at work making preparations for live animals to enter into our school.
In the beginning of March 2015 Mrs. Moore started teaching students about how chickens hatch, chicken anatomy and the basic needs of our living chickens. We presented all of this information to the community during our Spring Expo. While Mrs. Moore was teaching about chicken needs, Mr. Vince was hard at work building the coop.
Students took turns helping Mr. Vince down in our makerspace. For an hour a day we worked, for 3 straight weeks! At the end we had a beautiful coop that would we could put outside to house our chickens. We presented it outside during the Spring Expo.
Our chicks hatched 3 days before Expo. People were so excited to see the chicks and hear their peeping! It was a great event and we had so much fun.
Once the chicks were big enough they moved into a coop, with a run that was funded by Ann Arbor Educational Foundation. The chickens enjoyed their new home for a couple of weeks before we handed them off to Leslie Science Center for the Summer. It was a long year- but rewarding in the end. We were looking forward to the fall when our girls would start laying eggs!
PHASE 3
We have been busy this year implementing phase 3 of our project.
School came back and the chickens did to. The whole 5th grade went to the LSC to pick up the chickens, once we went everyone was so excited to see the chickens. The LSC found out that one of our chickens named Duck was a rooster, the first fifth graders and teachers named him Duck because Mrs.Moore’s son called him a Duck. Roosters are not allowed in the city, so Duck had to go to a farm. One of our other chickens had a hard time after Duck left, so we took her to live with Duck on the farm.
In the Fall we started designing our own egg cartons to sell our eggs. We had to somehow make money to buy the food and bedding that our chickens would need. We designed an ordering form and got busy making money! Our chickens are well fed and happy.
But we still had an itch to keep building...
Mr. Vince and Mrs. Moore found us a client to build a coop for! We worked hard on designing the coop for our client and will install it in the spring. We are hoping that each school year, the future 5th graders will find a client to build a coop for. This way the girls we have that are laying can go with the new coop and we can start over with baby chicks!
We have been busy this year implementing phase 3 of our project.
School came back and the chickens did to. The whole 5th grade went to the LSC to pick up the chickens, once we went everyone was so excited to see the chickens. The LSC found out that one of our chickens named Duck was a rooster, the first fifth graders and teachers named him Duck because Mrs.Moore’s son called him a Duck. Roosters are not allowed in the city, so Duck had to go to a farm. One of our other chickens had a hard time after Duck left, so we took her to live with Duck on the farm.
In the Fall we started designing our own egg cartons to sell our eggs. We had to somehow make money to buy the food and bedding that our chickens would need. We designed an ordering form and got busy making money! Our chickens are well fed and happy.
But we still had an itch to keep building...
Mr. Vince and Mrs. Moore found us a client to build a coop for! We worked hard on designing the coop for our client and will install it in the spring. We are hoping that each school year, the future 5th graders will find a client to build a coop for. This way the girls we have that are laying can go with the new coop and we can start over with baby chicks!