One of my favorite months to teach in is during April. We do a big unit on the life cycles of insects, butterflies, chickens, and frogs. Here are five fun and academic activities that are perfect when teaching students about frog life cycles in particular. From day one when you asks students what they actually want to learn to diving into the actual life cycles, your students are going to love these activities!
My favorite time of the year is spring. I feel like my class has finally hit the ground running, centers are running smoothly, students are more independent, and all the fun science lessons are being taught. During the spring I love teaching about various animal life cycles. My kids' favorite is the frog life cycle. Here are a couple of activities that you can do with your students to help them comprehend the frog life cycle.
With life cycles, the key is repetition. Once students start understanding that it is a cycle, it is easier to remember the stages. In the frog life cycle, they start out as egg spawn. They then hatch into tadpoles. Next, they start growing legs, lose their tails and turn into a froglet. In the final stage they lose their tail and are then considered a frog. The cycle starts over again when an adult frog lays eggs.
We start all of our life cycle units off with a KWL chart; this acronym stands for "What you Know", "What you Want to Know" and "What you've Learned". We sit on our carpet the first day and use the Frog Cutouts to brainstorm what we already know about frogs. Each different tidbit of information goes onto a frog cutout. I added the Carson-Dellosa® Grass Scallopped Bulletin Board Border to the outside edge of my easel to give our board a natural spin. At the end of our unit, we will fill out the Frog Cutouts with what we learned from our unit on frogs. The headers and a response sheet for students to fill out can be downloaded HERE for free.
Once we have filled out our KWL chart, we start reading all sorts of books on frogs. I put up a giant poster of the frog life cycle on my easel as well. We learn all the vocabulary of the life cycle: egg spawn, tadpole, froglet and adult frog.
Once we learn the life cycle, I let my kids explore it during center rotations. One of our favorites is using the Life Cycle Magnetic Activity Set. It comes with five different life cycles: chicken, frog, mealworm beetle, pumpkin, and butterfly. After I teach one complete life cycle, I will leave it out so students can continue to work on it even after we've moved onto a different life cycle.
Another fun center they can manipulate during center time is the FlipChex-Life Cycle magnetic set. What I really like about this center is that it is easy to self-check through matching. You can put out as many pieces as you need. There are five sets of life cycles in this center too.
The last center is the Life Cycle of a Frog Sticker Scene. Our kids loved these sticker scenes because they get to set their own scenes. They can put a bunch of frogs or a lot of egg spawn on each scene. They also can work on their vocabulary by naming the different stages of the life cycle.
With all these different ways to learn about the frog life cycle, I can guarantee your students will have a blast while learning.
