Frog Tongues

Wynter and I have started up our Science Club again. Since the old homeschool group disbanded, it’s just Wynter, and Jill, and I and our kids in the club. But it’s SO much better this way. The way the group was trying to run things made Science Club too chaotic and too crowded. There were just too many people that wanted to have their kids participate and the class sizes got out of control and made it kind of a nightmare to plan and teach lessons. The way we’ve decide to do it now is to focus on the three first graders, and gear the lessons to them. If the younger kids want to sit in and listen they can, but they are also welcome to go off and play. Most of the time Ivan and Adelia choose to go play during the lesson part, but come and do the activity part. And that is just fine with me.

We’ve finished with mammals and with birds, and have now moved on to reptiles and amphibians. Our first week back Wynter gave an awesome lesson to introduce the two. She explained the differences of each, and then told about some of the different animals in each classification. Lincoln was so impressed with the Poison Dart Frog, that I heard about it for days and days and days afterward. :)

Wynter also came up with the genius idea to have the kids keep a notebook. I’m so excited about this! She gave everyone a notebook with lined paper in it, and then as she was giving her lesson, she had them write down a few specific things, and then anything else they wanted to write about what they learned. We’ll used the notebooks every week, and when we’re done we’ll be able to look back on what we’ve done for the year. It’s so brilliant, I almost want to go back and add everything we’ve done previously, just so the notebook is complete. Haha! But seriously, such a good idea.


Today was my week to teach, and I picked to talk about frogs…probably because of Lincoln’s obsession with the Poison Dart Frog. I decided that the life cycle of a frog was a good, grade-level appropriate concept to focus on. I checked out a few books from the library so that I could show lots of pictures of all the different stages in a frog’s life. Then we cut out, glued, and colored the life cycle into our awesome notebooks. I thought they turned out great.

The next thing I taught them was the differences between frogs and toads. I read another book from the library and told them to listen and see if they could spot some things that were different about frogs and toads and some things that were the same. After that we filled out a little circle diagram to show what we had learned. This was a little harder for them, but appropriately challenging, and they did well. Of course, we also had to cut out circle diagram and glue it into our notebooks. Do you see why I love the notebooks so much! All our science stuff right in one place. No millions of loose papers to keep track of. Wynter, you are a genius!



I saved the fun activity for last, and the younger kids came to join in for this. We talked about how frogs (and toads!) have sticky tongues to help them catch their food. I took those little party blowers and stuck a couple of velcro circles on the ends of them. Then I cut a bunch of black circles out of card stock, and stuck the other side of the velcro to those and called them flies. That way when you blow the party blower all the way out, the velcro on it will catch the velcro on the flies. And wha-la! You’re very own, working model of a frog tongue. :) Thank you Pinterest, where I found a similar activity and modified it to fit our needs. I spread the flies out on the kitchen table, gave each of the kids a blower, and let them have at it. I think they had a good time.