Year 11 Students Look After Egg Babies As Part Of The Course Exploring Early Childhood

Exploring Early Childhood (EEC) Year 11 students have spent the past week looking after ‘egg babies’ as part of an assessment task designed to give the students an idea of what it means to look after something as fragile as an egg (or a baby).

The students have completed the topic in their course on ‘Pregnancy and Childbirth’ and as an assessment have now been tasked with looking after their ‘egg baby’ for one week. The students need to take their ‘baby’ with them to classes or after school events and for two nights during the week they need to get up twice to their crying ‘baby’ between the hours of 1am and 4am and record a video for 5 minutes showing how they have feed their baby and settled it back to sleep. As part of this process the students need to reflect on their feelings during this time and answer a number of questions.

“The students are learning the importance of looking after their ‘babies’ and understanding that this is hard work,” said teacher Ms Papazoglou.

In class we have already learnt about pregnancy and childbirth and now we are examining looking after a baby. We want to give the students the experience of waking up to a crying baby and although most babies would cry for longer than 5 minutes it does give the students a sense of having to wake up and will give them a better understanding.

For some students remembering that they need to take their ‘baby’ everywhere with them has been the first challenge. Danijela has named her egg baby Adrijana but forgot her in her locker on the first morning.

From not having to worry about something everyday to now having something to look after all the time is hard. Just having to remember it all the time is hard.

Three times during the week students can check their egg baby into ‘Egg Day Care’ during Homeroom time and then pick it up again at the end of Homeroom. This gives the students a short respite. “I think this project is cute,” says Isabella.

“We have our egg with us as we walk around, we get to take it everywhere. It is a new experience having to care for something everywhere you go,” she says.

On the weekend a few of us have a function to go to so we are going to collectively take our egg babies together. We will take some photos and create some fun memories of doing our egg project.