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- #11
Oh, okay! Thanks Lazy Gardener!!
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Hello all,
I just got a job at my local feed store, and am SUPER excited about it. They are a great company, employee centered and focused on sustainable and pesticide free practices. ANYWAYS, they know how crazy and passionate I am about raising chickens and they will be getting their shipments of chicks soon, which means...they will be teaching beginner chicken raising classes starting also that week. I have already expressed interest to my managers about teaching or helping teach classes, as my degree is in education and I feel like I am knowledgeable enough to pass on my chicken keeping knowledge to others. SO, that being said, I am going to come up with about an hours worth of material and create an outline about what I feel is important to teach people that probably don't have a lot of knowledge about chicken keeping. I would like to tackle the class mostly from a backyard chicken keepers perspective, as I believe most of our clientele will probably be most interested in that area.
I have some basic categories to touch on like "Buying your first chicks/breeds and their uses", "Proper brooders and adult housing/runs", "Feeding and Watering", "Basic cleaning and maintenance", "Ducks?", "Transitioning from the brooder to coop and egg laying ages", "Basic ailments and injuries", "Additional resources"
Please feel free to post in this thread things you think are pertinent, or wish you had known as a beginner so I can be sure to include it in my outline.
Thankfully if there's one thing my teaching degree taught me, it's how to make clear, concise presentations that don't tangent or become wrapped up in too much detail, (keeping the attention of kids is tougher than keeping the attention of adults, mostly).
Well, I am happy to report chick rearing class was a success! I really impressed my store manager and my audience. I made a separate, more concise handout for everyone and it has been so fun to get my customers excited about chickens!
I do have a question if anyone can chime in....since our chicks' arrival at the store we have had to deal with a few fatalities. We obviously only have them on chick starter and give them water with probiotic chick boost in it. I know fatalities are probably pretty normal, but does anyone know why they sometimes just seem to pass away suddenly? It's hard to watch them every second, so it's hard to say what the cause is, but I am curious to learn more about why they can die so suddenly. I have been really diligent about keeping their little rumps free of poo build-up, so I don't think pasty-butt is the culprit...