Teaching About Chickens In The Classroom

Students love learning about animals in the classroom.  Teachers love teaching about animals because it's engaging for the students, they pay attention and they can tie a lot of subjects together very easily. Teaching about chickens can allow you to easily cover every informational reading standard, life cycles, habitats, basic needs and similarities between adult and new chicken.

Chicks and Chickens by Gail Gibbons is a great book about all things chickens.  It has a ton of information that's relatable and easy for students to understand.  You could very easily teach all informational standards with this book.

Students can read about the chicken lifecycle to cover part of your lifecycle science standard.  You can use the reading to introduce students to new vocabulary lessons, key details, informational text features, retelling and informational writing.  Consider having the students write the lifecycle to explain how steps connect to one another.

Have students identify the main topic of paragraphs by splitting the book up amongst students groups.  They can construct posters with the information and share it with each other to cover listening and speaking standards.

If you've read about other birds in class, have students use the key details from both texts to compare and contrast the two.

Once students have read about chickens you can check their vocabulary knowledge by building a chicken flip chute.  On one side of a card you place the vocabulary word.  On the other side of the card you place the definition.  Students work with a partner to recall vocabulary.  Flip chutes are simple to make and the students have a great time with them.  If you aren't familiar with them you can watch a video on how to make them here.

If you would like to up the engagement even more and hatch chickens in your classroom, scroll all the way to the bottom for a link.


If you are too busy to pull together and create everything that you need for an amazing unit for your students, click below for the Chicken unit that I've created.