Hatching
Eggs Process
Scott's Home School Unit
Study
Here is the process we went through in completing
the Hatching Eggs Study
- Talked a lot about farming and what it would be like to
live on a farm and have chickens, including gathering
eggs and having fresh chicken to eat.
- Started looking for resources. A great book that I found
has some very practical info is "Backyard Livestock"
- Raising Good, Natural Food for your Family. by Steven
Thomas.
- This book is where I found plans for a home made
incubator. Plans are also avaiable on the internet at
these sources: ______________________
- My oldest child is 8, second in line is 6. They have both
enjoyed watching the building project. It was a great
opportunity to talk to them about wiring and electricity,
even though the wiring is minimal in an incubator. The
only partially complicated part was finding, and then
installing a thermostat. (Home Depot, $9.95) This was, by
the way, the most expensive part of the incubator. The
rest was pretty much built from scraps I had laying
around the garage.
- We collected some catalogs from different hatcheries that
had commercially avaiable incubaters and learned that
some are "forced-air" varieties. This simply
means that they have a fan to circulate the air. Did you
know fertile eggs give off carbon dioxide and they need a
good oxygen flow? So we decided to build our own fan out
of a little DC electric moter that belonged to Katie (6).
We couldn't use batteries (obviously), so we wired it to
a little black plug in transformer to some long lost
applience. We had to make sure it matched currents, etc.
We even built a little propeller for it our of some very
small wood scraps. Katie has made me promise to replace
her moter with a new one!
- more to come . . .