Hatching Duck Eggs Day 7

Today was day 7 of incubation!  This was a very important day because today we got to candle our eggs to see if the baby ducks are developing. 

To candle the eggs we shined a light inside the egg.  We knew that on day 7, we should see a small black spot in the middle and veins. 

We were thrilled to see that all 7 eggs are developing as they should! 

We will candle our eggs again on day 14 to see if the eggs are still developing as they should.  We would expect to see a much larger baby chick in the center, lots of movement, and still some veins.

Ask your child to share with you what they saw today!  

Here come the ducklings

It has been a very VERY exciting week!  Our duck eggs hatched!  In fact we had a perfect hatch this year.  We were very nervous for egg 3, but after some time along and some help from Mrs. Wanke, the duck from egg 3 hatched.

We noticed that some of our eggs were starting to pip.

Those pips quickly turned to holes. 

Then finally our first baby duck hatched!

Egg 3 was stuck in the egg.  We moved him to his own incubator and added in some wet paper towels for extra humidity.  When Mrs. Wanke came back Tuesday night he was still stuck.  So, she had to help him out.

He came to her house for a little extra TLC.  Mrs. Wanke's daughter, Ashley, named him Fin, because fin means warrior and he was a warrior!

Today our very last egg hatched.  We were in library at the time.  Mrs. Wanke video taped it for us since we haven not been able to witness a hatching yet. 

Candling our Duck Eggs

Today we did the first candling of our duck eggs.  Our eggs have been incubating for 8 days now.

Our incubator hard at work, keeping our duck eggs at 99 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is what the inside of the duck egg looks like at day 8.

When we candled the eggs today we were looking for veins and possibly some slight movement of the developing duck.  If we didn't see any veins then we knew that the egg was not fertilized and there would be no duck.  

Based upon our observations, we predicted the following

Egg 1:  no veins, no duck

Egg 2: veins, duck

Egg 3: veins, duck

Egg 4: no veins, no duck

Egg 5: veins, duck

Egg 6, veins, duck

Egg 7: no veins, no duck

Egg 8: veins, movement, duck!

Egg 9: no veins, no duck

Egg 10: no veins, no duck

Below is a YouTube video of a duck egg candling at Day 7.    She gives lots of good information about candling.

We have also been hard at working learning all we can about ducks.

My attempt at humor.

We have been reading articles about duck.  Then, we have to answer questions about ducks and find evidence from the text that supports our answers.  

One question was, Could a duck survive in Antarctica?  We said no, and because we looked back in the article we were able to support our answer by adding... because ducks are found all over the world except in very cold places.  Some ducks even migrate during winter.

This is the article about ducks that we read.  Notice how we highlighted key pieces of information!

This is the fun fraction activity we did with ducks!