This year I placed 25 dozen eggs and 25 incubators in classrooms in local elementary schools,  pre- schools and the local Conservation Office, where an adjacent school could come to observe. The purpose of this project is for the students to learn about how live develops. It also teaches them the responsibility for caring for the eggs to ensure they have the best chance at hatching. Since we get our eggs from the UK Poultry Research unit, they are not guaranteed to be fertile, so we do not have a 100% hatching rate. This teaches the students that sometimes, even when we do things correctly, forces beyond our control can cause things to not go the way we wanted them to. The teachers are provided with materials for them to adapt to their students age to use in teaching these lessons, as well as the basic stages that the embryos go through while maturing in the egg towards hatching. After they hatch, all of the chicks are placed on various farms for raising and laying eggs. This year we had approximately 600 students who participated in this project, an all time high for this annual program.