Chicken project hatches opportunities for Tinley students

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Mornings at Tinley Park High School are filled with the hurried sounds of students chatting on their way to class, locker doors slamming, bells ringing … and a rooster crowing.

The rooster is one of the hatchlings from Tinley Park High School’s chicken project and has no problem making his presence known.

“Yeah, especially in the morning,” junior Alyssa Hopman, one of the students involved in the project, said.

As students and faculty watched the chicks mature, the fledgling chicken project transformed into an interdisciplinary curriculum that has provided a unique experience for everyone involved.

“You don’t realize how much you have to learn and then how much you have learned,” science department supervisor Steve Granat said. “The adults are just as excited about the project as the kids.”

At the beginning of the school year, Granat took a group of students to Dickman’s Farm, in Herscher, to obtain chicken eggs.

“We learned from the farmer how to take care of them,” Hopman said.

After 21 days in an incubator, the eggs hatched and the chicks were placed on display in the applied sciences department, while students from an industrial sciences class built a chicken coop in a school courtyard.

The developing chicks allowed students in science teacher Chad Robson’s class to take a hands-on approach to learning about embryology, behavior and comparative anatomy.

“There’s a different level of learning that goes on when kids can see what they are working on,” Robson said. “A lot of them who otherwise would have been uninterested have become hooked.”

The students also learned about responsibilities and efforts necessary to care for chickens.

Senior Tim Berge has taken the chickens under his wing, so to speak, as he has been their main caretaker — and wrangler.

“It’s best to corner them and then pick them up,” Berge said about his technique for returning stragglers to the coop.

The original group of chickens matured after 15 weeks and now, the hens are laying eggs.

The project has expanded beyond the biology department to include consumer science classes that have allowed local preschoolers to visit the chickens, an entrepreneurship class that began marketing eggs to local bakeries and art classes that created a logo for the marketing effort.

“Everyone has had a part in this project,” Granat said. “What started as a question has blossomed into a huge cross-curricular project.”

Business teacher Michael Cicirale’s entrepreneurship class recently started selling fresh eggs to Zettlmeier’s Bakery in Tinley Park for $5 a dozen, the proceeds of which will go toward purchasing feed and other necessary supplies for the chickens.

The program’s marketing aspect can allow for the project, which was made possible through a $5,800 grant, to become self-sustaining.

It has taught students how to build strong connections with local business owners, Cicirale said.

“When you put them out in the community in front of managers and business owners, that’s where they’re truly learning,” he said. “It’s part of the process that they could not gain otherwise.”

Next fall, students taking honors physics will create solar panels or wind turbines to provide an energy source for the chicken coop and faculty will continue to find innovative ways for additional departments to get involved with the project.

“If we’ve piqued a student’s interest, whether it is in the marketing end of things or the agricultural end of things, then I think that we have definitely done a service to our students,” Principal Teresa Nolan said.