Ducklings hatched in the superintendent's office are now touring Anna ISD classrooms

For the past few weeks the most-watched spot in Anna ISD has been a corner of Superintendent Toby Tucker's office, where an incubator full of duck eggs sat under his eye.

The eggs have hatched, and the ducklings are now making the rounds of district campuses, NBC 5 reported Friday.

Tucker, who grew up in a farming family, bought the fertilized eggs and set up the incubator himself. As the eggs developed, he sent video updates to elementary classrooms across the district on a feed he nicknamed the "quack cam." Teachers built lessons on animal life cycles around it.

"We want to do something every year that connects my office to our classroom," Tucker told the station. He said many Anna students live in town and rarely get close to farm animals, "so we thought this would be a really fun project."

High school students take over

Older students had a role from the start. Tucker brought in high school students to track how the embryos changed inside the shells, and the district's agriculture students took charge of the birds once they hatched.

Those agriculture students are now measuring the ducklings' weight, height and coloring. They plan to enter them in the Fort Worth Stock Show, according to the report, and in the meantime are sharing them with younger students across the district.

Some elementary classes were among the first to meet the hatchlings, with Tucker walking the ducklings from campus to campus himself.

Sources

NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth