Understanding life cycles can be a bit abstract for our kiddos. Here are some engaging hands on activities to help your students understand the life cycle of a frog.
We are in the midst of our pond and frogs theme unit. This unit has a ton of fun and engaging activities and my kiddos LOVE it! We get tadpoles from a local pond and get to observe them while we are learning about their life cycle. It really helps bring the concepts to life for them and help the students to understand it.
We start by going through our theme unit vocabulary and filling out a poster about what a frog can do or has. This was really hard for my kiddos when we first began doing working on these posters. If you haven’t used them with your class before, you may need to do a lot of modeling and have one of the pictures of frogs for students to refer to. They will get it! I love to see how far they come just on thinking about a given item without it being present. Here is what they came up with about frogs:
As you can see, we have the theme vocab next to the poster we are working on. It helps trigger some ideas and helps with spelling.
Next, we read the book, How Does A Frog Grow? It has matching pictures which helps keep students engaged and builds in opportunities to ask comprehension questions to students who need visual choices. Win!
Then, the students use the matching pictures (in black and white) to sequence the frog life cycle. If needed, we refer back to the book to see which picture comes next.
After we have reviewed the life cycle of a frog, we sneak in receptive language practice…. Yup, I’m sneaky like that! LOL! In the picture below, we are practicing coloring the pictures by multiple step verbal directions. You can also reinforce the vocabulary your just introduced. For example, “Color the frogspawn light pink.”
Another day, we worked on review and generalizing with this frog life cycle crown activity.
