Welcome to BYC.
If you put your general location into your profile it will help us help you with your questions since climate often matters.
How many chickens do you have? Your post says 96, which seems unlikely for a new chicken owner, especially since there are also a couple random numbers in the text elsewhere -- computers and, especially, phones being weird about that.
Chickens are flock animals who don't do well isolated and alone. They are almost always better housed together.
Here are some generally accepted recommendations for chickens' space needs:
The Usual Guidelines
For each adult, standard-sized hen you need:
- 4 square feet in the coop (.37 square meters)
- 10 square feet in the run (.93 square meters),
- 1 linear foot of roost (.3 meters),
- 1/4 of a nest box,
- And 1 square foot (.09 square meters) of permanent, 24/7/365 ventilation, preferably located over the birds' heads when they're sitting on the roost.
If you show us photos of what you have we can help you get it all sorted out.
As for figuring out which bird is your best layer, well, there are a number of ways to do that. Watching the nests is one option, which is useful if you have different breeds who lay different colored eggs. Then, once you know which hen lays what you can keep track of who lays each day when you gather the eggs.
Trap nesting is the professional's way of keeping egg records, but it's not easy and presents some risk to the bird if the nests are not checked VERY frequently so it's not to be done casually.
And yes, you can put the birds into separate cages -- though sometimes they won't lay in an unfamiliar place and the stress of being isolated from the flock will stop their laying.
Since you mentioned the cold snap I'm guessing that you are in North America, where it's winter. That means that your birds are probably going to soon start laying more abundantly so a snapshot of who is laying *now* won't be particularly meaningful next month. They'll start laying more abundantly as the days lengthen into spring.
