I miss you all! I hope you are having a wonderful summer! :)

Have a Great Summer!

I had such an amazing year with all of you and I wish you the best of luck in grade three! Remember to keep working over the summer (especially reading)!!! It is important to practice so that you can do well in grade three. Thank you for all the laughs this year - you were the best class ever! :)

Here is my mailing address and e-mail address for those of you that want to keep in touch:
Cheryl Roberts
504 Brackley Point Road
Charlottetown, PEI
C1E 1Z3

cherylroberts@live.ca (my caroberts@edu.pe.ca e-mail should continue to work as well).

Enjoy the summer!
Mrs. Roberts :)

Tomorrow's Field Trip

Just a few reminders for tomorrow's field trip:

• If you are planning on coming as a parent chaperone you will need to pay admission at the movies and will need to find your own transportation. Thanks!
• The movie starts at 10am. Kids' packs are provided as part of the $10.
• We will be travelling to Victoria Park for a picnic lunch. Your child needs to bring a packed lunch with him/her. Please ensure that nothing requires the use of a microwave.
• Our afternoon will be spent at Victoria Park for playtime. We will not be going in the pool/sprinklers, so a bathing suit/towel is not necessary.
• Please make sure that you send sunscreen for your child as we will be outside for the whole afternoon, when the sun is very hot. Bug spray might be a good idea as well.
• There is no water fountain at Victoria Park (that I know of), so please send a bottle of water with your child.
• We will return to the school in time for dismissal. All children will be sent home on the bus as usual, unless I have been told otherwise.

It's going to be a great time! See you tomorrow!

Video of the chicks!

We let Salt and Pepper out while we cleaned their home! :) They like to explore! Don't mind Ms. MacKinnon and I chatting in the background!

More Pictures of Salt & Pepper

Today we bid farewell to our chicks, Salt and Pepper! They are going to a farm where they will be well looked after. One of the grade 8 students has adopted them and has promised us that he will take very good care of them.


As you probably already know, our chick in the brown egg did not make it. He fought a hard battle, but for some reason was not able to fully hatch out of his egg. As we told the children, it was nature's way of doing what was right for the chick. In most cases, if the chicks are too weak or have a physical deformity, they are not able to hatch. If you help them to hatch (which is not recommended), they will probably die soon after. Our other white silkie egg did not end up hatching at all (it never started). However, we are very happy to have hatched two beautiful silkie chickens!


Here are some pictures from our first few days with them!

Ms. MacKinnon holding her favourite chick, Pepper!

Day #1 - letting them pet them for the first time!

Out for a walk around the classroom while their home is being cleaned.

1 Day Old

Pepper is coming to get me!

Could they be any cuter?? :)

We took some time to explore the insides of the broken shells. These shells were excellent homes for Salt and Pepper as they grew and developed over the 21 days. It's hard to believe that they fit in there!

You can see the blood vessels (we were able to see this when we candled). Some of the yolk in this egg was not absorbed by the chick and you can see it in the egg. Normally the chick would eat the entire yolk before hatching.

This egg was much cleaner! Still lots of blood vessels!

Out for a morning stroll on the mat!
2 Days Old

Today was the day the children have been waiting for since they hatched! Today we let them hold the chicks! It was impossible for me to get pictures of everyone, because I had to help out when the chicks tried to climb out of their little hands! I was able to capture a couple of good pictures. This is hopefully something they will remember for many many years.

Summer Lee holding Pepper.

Emma Claire holding Pepper.

Dominic holding Salt.

Mary having a heart-to-heart with Salt. :)

Devin holding Salt.

Joey getting snuggly with Salt.

Teamwork. The chicks bring everyone together! :)

We are going to miss the chicks a lot! This was so much more special than just visiting chicks at a farm. We helped to create these chicks! They started out as empty eggs and with the special care and love of 25 grade two students, they turned into chicks. :) The children got to experience every aspect of the life cycle (unfortunately they got to experience death as well). I can't wait to hatch chicks again another year! It is something that I will never forget!

Grade Two is proud to introduce you to our new babies!

Ms. MacKinnon and I arrived at school this morning to the most exciting thing ever! I can't even begin to describe how happy I was when I saw two little chicks running around in the incubator! Wow - what an amazing feeling! I wish I had of thought to video the reactions when we told the children that two of the eggs had hatched. It was priceless!

Here are the chicks soon after hatching:

They're adorable, even before they fluff up!

Sensing that the morning would be spent watching chicks, we hooked up a document camera and projected a "live feed" of the incubator onto the classroom wall. This way, we could watch what was going on in the incubator without having to crowd around it.

Here one of the already hatched chicks is trying to help another egg hatch!

It was hard to get good pictures of the chicks in the incubator, but we couldn't open it until they had dried out and fluffed up!



The white chick playing with his empty shell!



The dark chick resting on the thermometer!

Our brown egg was giving it everything he had to hatch out. We got to watch hours of exciting footage of him pecking through the egg. His progress had really slowed down at the end of the day, so we are anxious to see if he was able to peck his way out or not.

The brown egg after the pipping has begun!

Once the chicks were fluffed up and dry, we had to move them to a new home. We filled a recycling bin with newspaper and paper towel and put the heat lamp above it.

They loved their new home! :)

We had a lot of fun watching the chicks play!

Having a rest!

Face to face! :)

Playing! :)

This has been such an incredible experience! It's amazing to think that these chicks started as just little eggs and we watched their entire development! I'm very proud of my grade 2's for growing such cute little chicks!

More updates to come soon!

Cheep! Cheep! The Excitement is Building!

I wish you all could have seen the excitment level in our classroom today! Seeing those happy faces makes all the hard work worth it! At lunchtime, I went to check on the eggs and discovered the first crack! One of our little chicks had started to poke through. Upon closer observation we noticed another egg with a crack, so the hatching process has begun. Throughout the afternoon, we could hear lots of cheeping! When the chick pokes its beak through the air cell, cheeping can be heard (even before the hatching begins). You can just imagine how much excitement this brought! I was as excited as the children! We anticipate that at least one chick will be out of its egg by tomorrow. Hooray! Stay tuned!

We cannot open the incubator during hatching (we have stopped turning the eggs and have increased the humidity). This makes it very hard to get pictures (plus it's hard for everyone to see what is going on). This is the best picture I could get. If you look really closely at the egg with the "X", you can see the crack. It is near the upper left corner.