HAPPY HATCHERY: Raising chicks gives kids ‘a real sense of wonder’

WASILLA — Jupiter, Copper, Donut and Bubba aren’t the most talkative members of Donna Levesque’s third-grade class.

But then, what do you expect? They just hatched.

Levesque teaches at Birchtree Charter School, a Waldorf-inspired school. In third-grade Waldorf classes, she said, the curriculum revolves around food, clothing and shelter. Part of that means building a shelter — kids and parents built a chicken coop on the school grounds — another means gardening and yet another revolves around sheep, wool and making clothing.

Animal husbandry is a key component; hence, the chicks that hatched this past week at the school.

“It’s a real sense of wonder,” Levesque said when asked what the kids get out of it. “There’s also the responsibility of chores, which is a big one.”

The idea is to get kids to where they don’t even have to be asked to care for the chickens. And the chores are no joke — gathering eggs (hopefully to sell), mucking out the coop, building a fence.

As for the names — Levesque said the kids picked them based mostly on the birds’ coloration, though also to some degree their personalities.

“They were named immediately after they were born,” she said.

The school hopes to use the end of the grounds with the coop as kind of a farmyard, different from the play yard on the other side.

Down the hall in Guin Hill’s third-grade class, students volunteer to sit in a circle and talk about their chicks. It’s Friday, and one of them died on Thursday.

They tried to save the chick but, Makenzie Grimes said, “it was too late and he only had an hour of life.”

Her classmate, Charlotte Brown, said that’s part of the challenge of raising animals — caring for them while “trying not to attach yourself to them at the same time.”

Brown said that sometimes animals are just born with problems. She demonstrated how she learned to check the sex of the tiny birds by looking at their wings.

“They don’t enjoy it, but it doesn’t hurt them,” Brown said. “We paint their toenails if they’re girls sometimes.”

On the other side of the circle, Matthew Milavec sat gently holding a little black bird.

“This one has a yellow Mohawk,” he said with a smile.

Carson Christensen said he talked about the way the little birds were interacting with each other with his grandmother.

“She said if the chicks peck at the other chick that means there’s something wrong with it,” Christensen said.

He said that they’re not terribly stable on their feet right now.

“If they trip you might want to help them because they can’t really get up too good,” he said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.