Activities this unit included placing and balancing frogs on a log/wooden block (to go with our song, "Five Green and Speckled Frogs". For math activities, we added numeral cards to a frog counting book, made frog number lines, created snake patterns, helped frogs eat the correct number of flies, and holding our own creature races by rolling a color and a number dice while making predictions on which creature will win first and who will come in last. Our strong hands fed flies to a frog with tweezers, traced curvy frog tongue paths, squeezing rubber frogs to open their mouths to feed them foam flies, and coloring lizards amazing colors! We also had a ton of plastic frogs and craft foam lily pads in the water table and a giant frog puzzle to put together.
How do lizards eat? With long sticky tongues! Our lizards ate with magnetic flies. Matching snakes and frog pictures and frog colors were favorite activities for the AM class. Sorting and grouping rubber snakes, turtles, lizards, and frogs into a sorting tray was a favorite of the PM class. There were no rules and no clues on how to sort the creatures. The kids thought of great sorting categories all on their own (by color, by creature, by creature and color, ones that had legs and no legs, animals that are on the ground and ones that can go in the water, etc.). We also enjoyed alphabet lily pad lotto, sorting turtles by size, and having fun with turtle bean bags and lily pads. Mrs. D made pipe cleaner snakes so we could fill up colander holes and string cheerios on them.
Can you put the animals where they belong? With a little clue card, the kids matched the plastic creature with it's initial sound (frogs went on the letter F's, snakes went on the letter S, etc.). We worked on strong hands by tracing frog paths, using pool noodle pieces to string long snakes on clothesline rope, lacing up turtle cards, and tracing, then cutting straight lines. AM kids fingerpainted chameleons beautiful and bright colors. PM kids made a snake numberline that went 1-30. They really had to work together to complete this long snake! Cinnamon sugar snakes were a hit for our cooking project. Our science experiment this unit was to learn about static electricity to make our frogs jump to the balloon. We first rubbed a filled balloon on our hair to create all of those negative charged electrons. Then we held the balloon above frog tissue paper cut outs, and VOILA! the positively charged tissue frogs magically jumped to the balloon. Of course this activity was done over and over again. They also had a great time seeing their hair stand up tall!
See our tadpoles? They are growing so fast! We are on the look out for hind legs. The PM kids painted snake pictures at the easel. There were a lot of colorful designs and creations. S is for Snake with our snake paper chain craft the PM kids did. Our frog below and his long tongue was a greater than, less than activity where we moved the frogs tongue to the "most" bugs because he was so hungry. Rattlesnake patterns were a hit. Each kiddo got a rattlesnake to hold (a plastic mini m&m container with some corn kernals inside and googly eyes and a tongue on the top. Mrs. D made a pattern on the giant black snake with pattern blocks. The kids were on the lookout to see if Mrs. D made a mistake. If she did, they shook their rattlesnakes. Then we fixed the pattern and continued on. There was lots of measuring going on. The AM kids measured how far a frog jumped with foot cards and the PM kids measured classroom items with frog feet rulers. Mrs. Bailey had fun with the kids during her language groups.
