Ducklings Horsforth

Our chicks 🐥
Throughout this term we have been exploring life cycles. During this time we had the special experience of observing the life cycle of a chicken, from an egg all the way to a big fluffy chick 🐥

Our journey began when they arrived cosy within an incubator - four white eggs, two blue eggs and one brown egg. For two weeks the eggs remained in the incubator, we candled them - using a torch to check if there were chicks growing inside each egg and unfortunately two glowed like a lightbulb, meaning this time there was no chick growing inside.

One morning when we arrived to our surprise a chick had hatched early! Throughout the day the following four chicks also hatched out 🐣
We were able to watch the chicks using their ‘egg tooth’ to peck their way out of the egg and join the others. Once they were all fluffy and dry, they moved into a bigger house called a ‘brooder’. It has a small heater that replicates what a mummy hen would do - keeping the chicks warm and cosy. They also have a bowl of water, a bottle of water and bowl of food pellets.
For the first week the chicks have to live on a ‘non slip’ mat to make sure their legs don’t stretch too far and to help them practice walking and climbing. After a week we swapped to sawdust shavings to help them practice digging for worms 🪱

The chicks we cared for were- three Cream Legbars, a Silver Legbar and a Vorwerk 🐔

The Vorwerk is the black chick with an orange head and when it grows up will have an orange body and a black head 🐔

The Cream Legbars will be a grey colour and lay blue eggs 🥚

The Silver Legbars will lay white eggs and be a browny colour 😊

The children have thoroughly enjoyed visiting our five fluffy chicks each day, observing them as they eat, drink, and practice using their wings. They our now on their next adventure at the farm, growing big and strong 😊

Thank you Eggucation 🐣❤️

Paige, our Maths Champion, created an array of exciting activities for us all to celebrate National Numeracy Day, showing our children that maths is all around us! She transformed our continuous provision into a maths adventure 😃.
The children had fun exploring numbers, including cardinality and counting, subitising and composition, and also numerical patterns, shape and space and measure.
It was a brilliant day! 💫
Thank you, Paige!

To celebrate World Earth Day, the theme this year being, “Our Power, Our Planet” we at Ducklings wanted to showcase our commitment to helping too 💚🌎.
We educate our amazing nursery children of the importance of re-using, re-cycling, litter picking, looking after our local environment and keeping our community clean and tidy. And very importantly, we take good care of our local biodiversity by using our little green spaces to seasonal plant bulbs and seeds to encourage wildlife and insects. We also enjoy feeding our birds, ensuring they have plenty of fresh food and water and a mini wildlife pond. Ducklings Eco Warriors are always striving to support our beautiful planet 🌎 “Small actions make a big difference when we all work together.”

Continuing our eco-friendly quest we have visited our local little library next to Broadgate Lane Primary school to take a couple of our books, and borrow one of theirs 😀. We also dropped off all of our glass jars and bottles to the local bottle bank.
We love to re-use and recycle ♻️💚

Our Eco Warriors used their brilliant looking eyes to search for litter on the ground, in bushes and surrounding the beautiful spring flowers. Great hand eye coordination was demonstrated as they all took turns to use the litter pickers. We found all sorts of things!
When we returned back to Ducklings we talked about what we can recycle and how important it is to think carefully about what we do with our rubbish, and not to throw it on the ground. Poor animals could try to eat it, get trapped in it, it doesn’t make our community look nice and rubbish could fall into the drains and wash away into our rivers and seas 😕
Fantastic work, team Ducklings! 👏👏👏👏♻️✅

We hope that everyone had a very Happy Easter!

There has been many ‘eggciting’ activities here at Ducklings 😃. We have played pin the tail on the Easter Bunny, Easter egg hunts, egg and spoon races and all sorts of Easter arts and crafts.

Some of our families enjoyed a special Easter egg hunt with treats at Parish of St James' Woodside
on Saturday too 😊🐣