It may be hard to believe, after Toronto’s coldest winter in twenty years—but spring always comes around again, bringing warmth, sunshine, and new life.
The Chick Life Cycle Exploration Set is a safe, humane, and hands-on way to explore animal life cycles with students. The model includes twenty-one plastic eggs, each of which represents one day in the development cycle of an incubating chick. All of the eggs can be broken apart for closer investigation, and all are conveniently labeled so that students can compare the chick’s development stages. Students will be amazed to see how the chick transforms after fertilization, culminating in a fuzzy little chick.
This model, targeted to Grades K-4, encourages students to develop scientific observation skills. Students can work individually or in groups to compare and discuss the differences between eggs at different stages of development. In addition to the eggs, this model comes with a teacher’s activity guide that is full of interesting facts about chickens and the formation of eggs, including a labelled illustration of the various parts of an egg. Teachers can use the blackline master sheet (included) to have students label a drawing of a cross-section of a newly laid egg, thereby encouraging students to apply their hands-on learning.
The Chick Life Cycle Exploration Set is now on display on the Ground Floor coffee table, adjacent to the Circulation Desk! If you can’t visit the library in person at the moment, you can also view a larger image of this model in the OISE Library K-12 Manipulatives Database, which we’ve designed to help OISE students explore the library’s hands-on learning resources.