Monster & Teeny

This week we’ve been mostly learning about chicks. Lots of learning from books for me, lots of reading stuff on the internet, lots of learning from just watching them. The best ways seem to be simply watching the chicks and applying common sense - I’ve read that you need to change their water everything from once a day to six times a day - we’re watching it and changing it when it gets full of wood shavings or kicked over. I’m also learning loads from people who have done this before, like everything it only takes a bit of experience in something to gain confidence, already I feel like I could give advice to someone about it all.

It’s also been amazing watching them, real fodder for the nature / nurture debate. There is clearly loads of instinct there, they know to cluster together for warmth, they know to head towards the source of light and heat when they’re cold and move away from it when they are too hot. They know how to peck - at pretty much anything at the moment granted, but the reflex is there. They can spot something different and give it a peck to see if it’s food - my freckles being a great (and painful!) example. They are flapping their wings and strutting about and showing early signs of flight already despite there being no other birds around to teach them this stuff or even lead by example. But they have done the imprint thing with us, cheep loudly and get up and come towards us when we go near their brooder, will jump on a hand to be lifted out of their box and as I initially put them close to my chest when they were first born they will scramble up my body to get to my chest now. They show no sign of fear of our cat but I assume if they were in the wild with other birds they would have learnt to move away from other creatures.

Monster and Teeny have got loads out of this already. We’ve previously kept caterpillars to hatch into butterflies and watched tadpoles devlelop into frogs and earlier this year we watched lambs being born, but this has been the most exciting project and they were lucky enough to watch at least one complete hatch each. They’ve been handling the chicks lots and are very confident and gentle with them, enjoying the caring for them of changing their water and getting them food and playing with them as we let them have a couple of periods of running around our lounge each day. I could have gone down the homeschooling route and got them to do various chick related tasks but aside from getting various books to read with them - either fiction featuring chickens and eggs or junior reference books with details about chickens and eggs I’ve done nothing either than talk to them about everything that is happening, give them reponsibilities for helping and been very honest about the risks and possibilities. We have one deformed chick - it only has one wing but is otherwise fine, so that sparked lots of conversations about deformities generally and how it might effect it. Birth defects in humans is something we have previously talked about and we were aware that there is a high rate of deformities in chicks so were semi-prepared for the chances of one of our eggs hatching thus. There has been plenty of chick inspired art here, lots of video clip and photo taking by the children as well as us and the usual debates surrounding the naming of a creature including Monster and Teeny deciding on a competition opened out to our friends to come up with a name for our fifth chick once we’d all named one each. They chose the winner with the chick being temporarily called ‘Competition’ by them in the meantime.

I’m sure there will be learning opportunities and dramas aplenty in the coming weeks as we learn whether we have cockrels or hens, decide which, if any we keep and work out where we are going to house them if we keep them and then there will be all the further education for all of us in just what being chicken keepers entails. This has been a great example of just how we home educate, constantly introducing ideas, concepts and experiences, learning together as we go using a variety of methods and dealing with challenges and new ideas along the way. I’m loving the parallels of chick rearing to parenting generally and we all get to saw aww a lot at cute bundles of fluff with the promise of fresh eggs one day. Win: win!