Morning Chicken Routine
Every morning my 7 year old follows her morning chicken routine. This “chore” teaches her responsibility and accountability. My daughter actually really enjoys her morning chicken routine and so she doesn’t really see it as a chore.
This chicken routine is always to be done before we sit down for breakfast. I think it’s important to show respect to our animals and this is one of the ways we do that. If the chickens haven’t gotten fresh water and food, then we don’t sit down and eat either.
This routine really doesn’t take longer than about 5 minutes.
Step 1 – Clean and Refill Water
This is just like it sounds! She dumps out the old water from the previous day, sprays the bucket clean, and then refills.
If the bucket isn’t getting clean by simply spraying it then that’s a sign it’s time to take the sponge to it and clean it with soap and water, (I will usually do this once a week or so).
Winter Tip: If you don’t have a heated water bucket during the winter months when the water freezes, dump the water out the night before so that you don’t have to fight the ice when the bucket is frozen solid the next morning. Chickens don’t come out of their roost during the dark hours so it won’t hurt them to not have access to water during the night.
Step 2 – Throw Out Scratch
The next thing she does is throw out a bit of chicken scratch.
Chicken scratch is a feed usually made up of whole grains that you feed to your chickens in addition to their main feed. This feed you usually throw into the dirt as chickens love to scratch around and “hunt” for their food.
Step 3 – Evaluate the Chickens
While the chickens are scratching around for their chicken scratch my daughter will look over the chickens checking that they are healthy. Really, this just means she checks to make sure there is nothing out of the ordinary.
Recently when the chickens came running up we noticed one chicken was limping. Upon further inspection we saw that one of her nails had gotten ripped off. It wasn’t bleeding any longer, but if it had then we would have had to stop the bleeding as sometimes their nails can bleed profusely. Also, we needed to keep an eye on it to make sure it didn’t get infected.
We still aren’t sure exactly what happened to her nail, but we’re happy to report that she’s doing much better and healing nicely.
Step 4 – Check Chicken Food
A quick glance at the chicken food is all this step really requires. If the food seems to be low my daughter just reports that to me and I will refill their food. I usually keep up on this pretty well and so they haven’t run out yet. I like her to check anyway for good measure.
Step 5 – Collect the Eggs
Our chickens are early layers. They lay their eggs almost always before my daughter heads out to conduct her morning routine. They lay at about 6am and my daughter usually heads out at about 6:30 or 7:00.
We have 4 chickens and they are optimal layers, meaning they lay pretty much everyday. We get 4 eggs almost every single day. If we only get 3 eggs one morning then she will check again around lunch to see if maybe a hen was running behind schedule or just taking the day off.
Morning Chicken Routine
There you have it! 5 simple steps each morning to keep our girls happy!
I do always head out an hour or two after my daughter to do my own outside chores during which time I double check her work.
Check out this article too —> Lessons Our Chickens Have Taught My Children!
For Reference we have Red Star Hens.
Do you have chickens? What does your chicken routine look like? Do your kids help out with the responsibilities? Let me know in the comments!
