Teaching your students about the chicken life cycle or Easter?
This blog post has a free downloadable activity you can use!
I love connecting the content areas (science, in this case) with my literacy instruction. When I first started teaching my chicken life cycle unit, I had my kids create nonfiction books about the stages in the chicken life cycle. They liked doing this, but the activity only lasted a day or two.
So then I started thinking, “How could I bring more writing into this unit?” And then the “My Life As a Chicken” writing project was born!!
In this free writing project, students write pretend journals from the point of view of a chicken. Have your kids imagine that they’re tiny baby chicks inside eggs, trying to peck their way out.
You might ask your students…
- What would you be thinking inside your egg?
- How will you feel when you finally hatch and see the world for the first time?
If you want to do a similar writing project, you might prep your kids by first teaching them about the stages in the chicken life cycle. You might show them this video of baby chicks hatching. You may want to read aloud Diary of a Worm (Doreen Cronin) or a similar book so that they can get an idea of what diary/journal writing sounds like.
If this writing project sounds fun to you, click on the image below to download it for free!
Included are two different versions of the project (one for younger kids and one for slightly older kids), so you can choose the one that works best for you. If you try it out, I’d love to hear how it goes!