Hatch The Chicken for Connecticut School Librarians

A five-week live hatching program for Connecticut school libraries and classrooms — with four-week options to fit school calendars. We deliver a tabletop incubator that arrives already programmed, seven hatching eggs, a candling light and a brooder kit, with simple written setup instructions — then come back at the end and collect every bit of it, chicks included.

How it works

• Twenty-one days in the incubator, then two weeks with live chicks. Four-week options are available so the program lands clear of your district’s breaks.
• Every hatch lands on a school day — never a weekend. You will know your exact hatch date before you commit.
• A book stays with the school. Every program includes Where Do Chicks Come From? by Amy E. Sklansky, yours to keep. Book again and we bring a different one.
• Weeks 1–3, the incubator. It turns the eggs itself and holds its own temperature. No humidity to manage. Warm water three times a week, and the lid stays shut after lockdown. Weeks 4–5, the chicks: fresh food and clean water morning and afternoon, a look to check everyone is bright, and a bedding change between weeks four and five. Small, but real — we leave written instructions and a phone number.
• We take everything home, chicks included. Raising and rehoming them is our responsibility, not yours. No school in Connecticut is left working out what to do with seven chickens in June.
• Honest numbers. Expect three to five chicks from seven eggs. Not every egg becomes a chick, and we will help you find the words for that before it happens.

Standards

Connecticut adopted the AASL National School Library Standards as state standards on 1 December 2021. This program supports AASL I.B.1, I.D.2 and V.A.2, and the science performance expectations NGSS 1-LS3-1, 3-LS1-1 and 3-LS3-1. A one-page alignment sheet you can forward to your principal is in the Library Hatch Kit below.

Grade by grade, K–5

The standards fit grades 1 and 3 directly. Every other elementary grade still gets something real — and where a grade has no life-cycle standard, we say so.

• Kindergarten. A needs board: what we give the eggs, what the chicks need, and how that differs from the plant on the windowsill. (K-LS1-1)
• Grade 1. The book does what the incubator can’t — there is no parent bird in the room, so the class lists a hen’s jobs and finds which piece of equipment does each one. (1-LS1-2, 1-LS3-1)
• Grade 2. No life-cycle standard here. What it carries is observing, measuring and recording — and grade 2 writes the captions kindergarten reads.
• Grade 3. The anchor grade: the life cycle as it happens, a trait table of their own data, and a prediction ledger for how many of seven eggs will hatch. (3-LS1-1, 3-LS3-1)
• Grade 4. Candling shows the air cell, the veins and the chick developing, and on hatch day they see the egg tooth — a structure with one job that falls off within days. (4-LS1-1)
• Grade 5. No life-cycle standard either. But one yolk built a whole chick with nothing added for 21 days, and grade 5 can run the candling station for the younger classes. (5-PS3-1)

The full grade-by-grade activity sheet is in the Library Hatch Kit below.

Grades 4–12: not a science lesson — a reason to come to the library

The science standards for hatching sit in grade 1 and grade 3, and we would rather say so than pad an alignment page. But several of our longest-running customers are nowhere near those grades, and the reason is not curriculum.

• An incubator is a destination. A counter ticking down from 21, and then two weeks of chicks, is a reason to walk into the library nearly every day for five weeks — and then a reason to bring a friend. If your problem is footfall rather than alignment, that is the pitch.
• Programs built around daily routine and responsibility. Feeding, watering and checking on something living, at the same time every day, is real work with a real outcome. Life skills, transition and special education classrooms are among the customers who book with us year after year.
• Older students teaching younger ones. A high school child development or early childhood class runs the hatch and hosts the elementary classes who come to see it. The teenagers do the explaining, which is the part that makes it stick.

Tell us the grades and we will tell you honestly whether it fits. Sometimes the answer is that it belongs in a different room in your building — and we would rather say that than sell you the wrong thing.

Egg & life-cycle read-alouds, K–3

The list from the bookmark, with ISBNs ready to paste into a Titlewave or Destiny cart. Hardcover editions unless noted.

• An Egg Is Quiet — Dianna Hutts Aston & Sylvia Long · 978-0-8118-4428-4
• Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones — Ruth Heller · 978-0-698-11778-5 (paperback)
• Chicks & Chickens — Gail Gibbons · 978-0-8234-1700-1
• Egg — Kevin Henkes · 978-0-06-240872-3
• First the Egg — Laura Vaccaro Seeger · 978-1-59643-272-7
• Where Do Chicks Come From? — Amy E. Sklansky (Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out, Stage 1) · 978-0-06-028892-1 — we bring this one
• Let’s Hatch Chicks! — Lisa Steele (Young Voyageur) · 978-0-7603-5785-9
• Interrupting Chicken — David Ezra Stein · 978-0-7636-4168-9

Grades 4–6

Independent reading that holds up while the incubator is in the room.

• Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer — Kelly Jones · 978-0-385-75552-8 — letters, a new farm, chickens with unlikely abilities. The one that circulates.
• Chickenology: The Ultimate Encyclopedia — Barbara Sandri & Francesco Giubbilini, illustrated by Camilla Pintonato · 978-1-64896-042-0 — breeds, anatomy, eggs. Browsable, and it answers what children actually ask.
• Egg: Nature’s Perfect Package — Steve Jenkins & Robin Page · 978-0-544-64049-8 — every kind of egg, not only ours.
• Feathers: Not Just for Flying — Melissa Stewart · 978-1-58089-431-9 (paperback) — pairs with watching down turn into feathers in week four.
• Citizen Scientists — Loree Griffin Burns · 978-0-8050-9062-8 — observation, record-keeping and real data. The natural companion to a candling log.
• Chicken Boy — Frances O’Roark Dowell · 978-0-689-85816-1 — harder and warmer, for confident readers in grades 5–6.

Middle school

For grades 6–8 the hatch is a way into ethics, food systems and what it means to be responsible for something alive.

• Project Mulberry — Linda Sue Park · 978-0-544-93521-1 — a classroom animal-raising project, and a child who starts asking whether it is right. The closest book there is to what your building will be doing.
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Young Readers Edition — Michael Pollan · 978-0-8037-3415-9 — where food comes from, written for this age.
• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate — Jacqueline Kelly · 978-0-312-65930-1 — a girl, a notebook and a naturalist grandfather in 1899.
• The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly — Sun-mi Hwang · 978-0-14-312320-0 — a hen who wants to hatch an egg of her own. Adult crossover; grade 7 and up.
• Wringer — Jerry Spinelli · 978-0-06-440578-2 — Newbery Honor. Read it first: the boy is expected to wring pigeons’ necks at the town shoot. The strongest book here on courage, and not for every room.

Picking a date

Connecticut towns don’t share a calendar. February break, April break and even which holidays a district actually closes for all vary town to town. So instead of guessing, we publish dates across the whole spring and help you find the one that clears your break weeks — and if your program crosses a three-day weekend, we tell you before you book, not after.

Tell us your district and your testing window and we’ll find you a week that works.

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Booking and questions: 844-310-8782 or info@farmerjoesgardens.com
Please mention CASL or ask for the Library Hatch Kit so we know where you found us.

900+ programs since 2022 · 276 schools · 93 Connecticut public libraries · zero reported illnesses since 2022

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Hatch The Chicken is a program of Rent The Chicken · Farmer Joe’s Gardens LLC