WIGGLY WORMS AND NEWLY HATCHED CHICKS: A Visit with Mrs. Best’s Kindergarten Class

Over the last ten years I have written three books about Jennifer Best and her kindergarten students at Haynes School in Los Angeles, beginning with HATCHING CHICKS IN ROOM 6 which follows the process of incubating eggs and raising chicks after they hatch.

After the chicks grow up, the chickens live in an enclosure at the school.

Every year I visit Mrs. Best's class (now in Room 4) to share my books and learn what the students are doing. My visit this year was timed to be on hatching day for the chicks. When I arrived, I saw three of the chicks hopping around in the incubator. Two eggs had yet to hatch. The children were watching the chicks directly in the incubator, or could see them enlarged on the screen in the front of the room which was projecting the image via YouTube. Technology is amazing!

I began my presentation by asking the children how they knew that chickens are bird. The answer: they have feathers and lay eggs. Then I showed them my ostrich egg and measured their wingspans.

My next books with Mrs. Best were BUTTERFLIES IN ROOM6 and PLANTING A GARDEN IN ROOM 6. The students had just finished raising painted lady butterflies and released them in the school garden. 

We talked about how worms are good for the garden and then I read WIGGLE AND WAGGLE while Mrs. Best acted out the story with my Wiggle and Waggle sock puppets. Then the students each had a chance to see worms up close, hold them, and inspect them with a magnifying glass. Afterward they drew pictures and wrote about what they saw.

Red worms are good for recycling nutrients in the soil..

In the year that I wrote PLANTING A GARDEN IN ROOM 6 the students had a very successful vegetable garden. This year they also planted vegetables in a planter box outside. Unfortunately, hungry bunnies have invaded the school yard and ate all the vegetables except for a very large tomato plant and a pumpkin vine.

Jennifer Best and the giant tomato plant and pumpkin vine.

I had a fun afternoon in Mrs. Best’s classroom and enjoyed seeing all the projects displayed on the classroom walls. Before I left I gave each student a copy of my folding book WHO HAS MORE? WHO HAS FEWER? 

On one side of each page they can count the eggs of seven different kinds of birds. On the other they can count the baby birds just hatched from their eggs—just like the chicks they saw hatch in the incubator in Mrs. Best’s class. The students are lucky to have such a wonderful teacher as Mrs. Best who provides them with so many hands-on science opportunities.

Chick and eggshell inside incubator.