Looking for facts about chickens for kindergartners?
If you want to help your little ones learn about chickens while keeping them interested with fun facts - below you’ll find 35 interesting facts about chickens:
35 Facts About Chickens for Kindergarteners
- Female chickens are called hens, males are called roosters, and babies are called chicks.
- A group of chickens is called a flock.
- Roosters have the important job of looking out for predators, and of course, waking everyone up at the crack of dawn. Cock-a-doodle-do!
- Chickens are able to communicate in their own “language” which contains more than 30 different sounds. - Bwak!
- You can generally tell what color eggs a chicken will lay by looking at its earlobes. For example, a chicken with white earlobes will lay white eggs.
- Chickens are great swimmers, they just choose not to if they’re around water.
- Chickens that lay blue or green eggs (yep, not all chicken eggs are white or brown) are called “Easter Eggers”.
- Chickens make great pets. In fact, it’s estimated more than 13 million Americans have backyard chickens.
- Chickens have to eat grit along with their food to help them break up and digest the food in their stomachs.
- The record for the most yolks inside one eggshell is 9.
- Chickens are social animals, they love playing and hanging out with their flock mates.
- They like to sleep up high on roosting bars because in the wild they would sleep in trees at night to keep safe.
- There’s a fluffy breed of chicken called Silkies. They look more like poodles than chickens!
- Some breeds of chicken will lay around 260 eggs per year.
- There are more than 25 billion chickens on earth. That’s more than there are people.
- Chickens are the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex on earth today.
- Chickens have better eyesight than we do during the day. But worse eyesight when it’s dark.
- It takes around 26 hours for a hen to produce an egg from start to the moment she lays it.
- Chickens clean themselves by taking "dust baths". They dig a shallow hole in the ground and roll around to get clean.
- Chickens can’t blink as we do. They actually have a third eyelid that wipes their eyes.
- Despite being a bird with wings, the longest recorded flight for a chicken was just 13 seconds.
- Chickens are very smart. They can remember people and recognize them by their faces and the sound of their voice.
- Those red dangly things beneath their beaks are called Wattles.
- The red thing that sticks up on the top of a chicken's head is called a Comb.
- Scientists believe chickens have dreams just like we do. Although we don’t know what about - we can only imagine.
- Mother hens talk to their chicks while they’re still in the egg - and the chicks chirp back when they’re old enough.
- There are hundreds of different breeds of chicken, ranging from all kinds of colors, looks, and sizes.
- Chickens will eat just about any insects and bugs they find, this includes spiders, ants, and flies. Yuk!
- Hens like to lay eggs in nests, which is why we provide nesting boxes for them.
- You can test how fresh an egg is by putting it in water. If it sinks, it’s fresh. If it floats, it’s not.
- A chicken will start producing an egg by seeing daylight, they then need 14-16 hours of light a day to keep producing eggs.
- When sitting on eggs, hens turn them up to 50 times a day to keep the chick from sticking to the inside of the shell.
- Hens will happily sit on another hen’s eggs and keep them warm until they hatch.
- Chickens have just 350 taste buds, which compared to our 10,000 means they can’t taste well at all.
- Raw beans are very toxic to chickens, they’re fine when cooked but deadly if not.
There you have it. 35 facts, ranging from the unusual to the unlikely, and some interesting things in between.
If you want to learn more about different types of chickens and what’s like to raise backyard chickens, please check out more of the articles in the blog.
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Image credits - Header image by Photo by Rowan S on Unsplash
