“They look so cute,” second-grader Gilberto Carranza said of the baby chicks that hatched in his classroom at Northwest Elementary School.

In early June, baby chickens were born in all of the second-grade classrooms, part of an annual unit on animal life cycles. Incubators with eggs were delivered to each room, and students had to ensure that they were kept at 100 degrees for three weeks. Once the baby chicks broke through their shells, they were moved to other containers and cared for by the students for about a week until going back to Suffolk County Farm in Yaphank.

Teacher Annette Fox said that her students hypothesized about how many eggs would hatch. They also completed writing assignments about the development of the baby chicks and practiced using transition words. 

Second-graders at Northwest Elementary School explored the past with help from members of the Amityville Historical Society. 

The students recently visited Lauder Museum in the village to learn about the history of Amityville through displays, photos and maps. As a follow up, historical society representatives Patricia Cahaney, Seth Purdy and Doris Reynolds visited Olimpia Karounos’s class and showed off various artifacts, some at least a century old, such as a rotary telephone, washboard and coffee grinder. 

The field trip and classroom visit supported the second-grade social studies curriculum, which focuses on communities and how they change over time. Students also created their own personal timelines with photos of themselves from birth through the present.