Here is a close up of what our tadpoles looked like when we first got them back on March 25th. They had just hatched from their eggs the day before this picture.
Here is what they look like today (April 22,) almost a month later! They have grown a ton but no little legs yet!
Right now they eat lettuce that we washed, cut up, and froze. Here Naomi is chopping them up some fresh lettuce to freeze.
I'm not big on having pets, so both kids have been particularly thrilled and fascinated by the tadpoles. They love to feed them and then watch them eat.
Here both kids are doing their "work". If you check out my Frogs Page on Pinterest, you will see links to some great YouTube videos, and frog learning sites and printables.
Here is a close up of the site Naomi was on about frogs. It taught all about a frog's life cycle, and then had some games to reinforce the concepts. It was great!
I found a template online I used to make the pieces of a felt frog. The purpose was to illustrate the stages of a frog's life cycle. It went from egg, to tadpole, to froglet, and finally frog. I had NO IDEA how much Naomi would LOVE this! She had so much fun telling the story of "A Life of A Frog" and did it over and over again. What great storytelling practice, and reinforcement of the concept and vocabulary terms!
The picture on the left is the froglet since it still has it's tail, and the one on the right is the mature frog. The piece of blue felt is supposed to be the pond. ;)
Here Naomi is doing the felt frog again. This picture of her was too cute not to post! For some reason I can't get videos to upload on here or I would have posted her telling her frog story! Check my wall on Facebook as I will try to upload it there instead.
This was another simple thing that we ended up doing over and over again. It was mostly for Nathan but Naomi had fun with it too. I just printed off 5 frogs, and had the kids pretend that our pocket chart was a log, and the the hamper a pool. Then we sang "5 Green and Speckled Frogs" and practiced counting forwards and backwards to 5, by having the frogs jump from the log into the pool. Simple, but they LOVED it!
Nathan also had fun putting the "pool" on his head and running around in circles. hehehe
We used the same frogs and pocket chart for Naomi to practice her ordinal numbers.
Here is a peek at some of the frog themed pages we did.
We watched several videos on YouTube of frogs eating bugs. The kids were fascinated by their long, quick tongues. Here they got to try eating like a frog! I put a Velcro dot on the end of this party blower, and then cut up some little bits of felt to make "flies".
They thought this was hilarious!!! They both took turns "eating" flies until the blower finally broke. It was fun, and I don't think either of them will forget anytime soon how a frog catches its food!
The average frog can jump 20 times its body length in a single hop. Using the frogs we made for a craft, we counted 20 lengths of the frogs body, and then measured it. Naomi was very impressed with a frogs jumping ability!
Then I got out two of our carpet squares, and we pretended they were lily pads. We started off with them right beside each other, and then jumped from lily pad to lily pad.With each jump we moved them a little bit farther apart, and measured the distance. All was good, and we were having fun, until....
Naomi realized she couldn't jump as far as a frog. Then she cried. My daughter isn't competitive, nope, not at all, especially not with a paper plate frog.... What can I say, she comes by it honestly! ;) She got over it fairly quickly and we moved on to something else. That was the end of jumping like a frog though. *grins*
Here are the paper plate frogs the kids made. I think they turned out so cute! They are from DLTK and you can find the link to them, and everything else on my Frog Page on Pinterest.
Here is a peek at our tadpoles new home. We moved them to this bigger bin with rocks, so they would have something to climb up on to once their legs grow. I will try to post pictures when they turn into frogs!
We really enjoyed our week on frogs, and I felt like we all learned a lot! In addition to the things I showed, we read a lot of stories about frogs. We read "The Frog Prince" and many of the books from the "Froggy" series that we have. There were also many stories about frogs that Naomi listened to on the "Tales 2 Go" app I have on my phone. We LOVE that app and we all enjoyed the variety of frog stories. This was a fun mini unit and I'm pleased with the large number of subjects were were able to include in it. Until the next time!
Karla
