Above, fourth-grader Kinsley Smith, of Kate Jordan's Butler Catholic class, transports a chick from an incubator to a tote with a heat lamp attached.

Students in Butler Catholic School's fourth-grade class were singing “Happy Birthday” Wednesday morning when they heard a tiny cracking sound.

The 10th birthday celebration of Kinsley Smith turned into a celebration for a baby chick that was finally hatching after incubating for weeks in the classroom at the East Locust Street school.

From there, the students couldn't take their eyes off the hatching Swedish Flower chick, which was part of teacher Kate Jordan's lesson plan on life cycles.

“This is a unit on life cycles of different animals,” said Jordan, fourth-grade teacher at Butler Catholic. “This is my first time doing anything like this. We have just been given the opportunity to witness this, and we have followed along through the lesson from when the eggs are fertilized.”The class received nine eggs for incubation, which Jordan said were not all expected to contain chicks that would hatch. By Friday, six of the eggs had hatched.The eggs came from Swedish Flower chickens and Barnevelder chickens, and Jordan said the class would check on them in the incubator each day to see their day-to-day development.“We have done a few cycles of candling, which is when you shine a light into the eggs to look at the embryo,” Jordan said.Jordan was able to teach new lessons to her students throughout the incubation process, from the terminology of life cycles and growth and development to lessons on the scientific method.

“With the chick unit, I just tried to introduce some different vocabulary that went along with it,” Jordan said. “We talked about different parts of the egg, like how the white part of the egg has protein.”The process also allowed Jordan to teach the students lessons about incubating eggs.“We're realizing it's a lot more difficult than we thought,” Jordan said. “There's temperature, which I don't think they knew played such a large role. Our humidity has been kind of out of control. We have to keep it within a certain range because if it's too high, they drown. If it's too low, they can't break through.“This is what science is: you have an experiment and make predictions.”Jordan said several students got permission from their parents to adopt chicks once they hatched, and the first, dubbed “Cuddles” by her students, will be adopted by Kinsley, the birthday girl.“She's actually going to be the one that takes the chicken home whenever it's old enough,” Jordan said.

Butler Catholic teacher Kate Jordan points out one of the newly born chicks to fourth-grader Chloe Seybert.

Butler Catholic fourth-grade students in Kate Jordan's class have been waiting for about three weeks for the six eggs in the back of their classroom to hatch. On Friday morning, the last of the chicks hatched.

Butler Catholic School students in Kate Jordan's fourth-grade class hatched six chicks from an incubator.

Butler Catholic fourth-grade students in Kate Jordan's class have been waiting for the past 21 days for the nine eggs in the back of their classroom to hatch. By Friday morning, six of the chicks had hatched, and the students moved the newly born chicks from the incubator to a tote with a heat lamp attached.