Frog Life Cycle work

Have I mentioned our new classroom pets?  We now have 4 tadpoles living in our classroom thanks to one of my students who brought them to us (at my request after he brought one for show and share).  I am anxious and excited to raise these little guys to froghood.  I forgot to take a photo of them swimming in their little tank, however.  Hopefully, we'll keep them alive until they become frogs.  That would be very, very exciting.

Because of our new little aquatic friends, I decided to put together a frog life cycle activity for the science shelf.  This shelf has been pretty bare so far since we haven't formally started our study of the animal kingdom.  I was lucky to find some little frog booklets left by one of the previous teachers.  I used the pictures from this work to make what is shown below. 

Here is the "new" top shelf of our science shelf with the frog life cycle work on top.  This shelf is situated directly under a bulletin board.  I attached my example of this work to the bulletin board just above the shelf.  That way, the children will have a master copy to refer to. 

Instead of doing a booklet with pages, I decided to use a paper plate for this work.  I like how this shows the cyclical nature of the life cycle (i.e. how one stage leads to the next and the next in an endless pattern). 

To do this work, the child will take one paper plate from the basket shown above and one paper with pictures.

Along with the plate and paper, they will take a wooden bowl to their table.  It contains the colored pencils, glue stick and scissors they will need to complete the work. 

I will model this activity at line time so the children will know the order of the steps to follow:  color the pictures; cut out the pictures; glue the pictures onto the plate.

Also on the science shelf is a basket which contains the models of the frog life cycle.  I have shown these to the children at line time and they have enjoyed taking them to a table and sequencing them in order as shown in the photo above.

Next week in our weekly "photo gallery" on the blog be sure to look for photos of the frog life cycle work.  I am pretty sure it will be a popular activity.

Comments

[Aditi]

This is such an excellent idea! can't wait to try this at home. good luck with raising the tadpoles.

[Kim]

Where did you find the life cycle frog models? Very cute!

When we raised tadpoles I didn't realize how carefully we had to watch during that time when they start growing legs and complete that transition to breathing air. Just a fwiw. We actually had one drown because we hadn't gotten the ledge and dry portion of the tank set up fast enough.

[Patty]

I have several lifecycle works in my classroom. I also have the lifecycle of a frog. I hot glued some of those clear plastic "pony beads" together to resemble the frog's eggs. It worked great!

[Lindart]

Lovely! I have this set of frogs as well, great idea to use the plate! It's times like this I miss my older children!!