Fables and frogs

Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students are learning about Spring, the life cycle of the frog and the fable, “The exploding frog” (aka “The frog and the ox”).


The life cycle of a frog


Life cycle of a frog


Panama frogs serenade females – The trials of life – BBC


The mystery of the red-eyed tree frog

Here are the links we have used in previous years:
ianmclean.edublogs.org/2011/10/18/frogs-frogs-frogs-life-cycles-fables/.

Frogs and their life cycle


Aesop: biography of a great thinker

Following their investigations into variations on Aesop’s fable of The exploding frog (aka The bull and the bullfrog, aka The frog and the ox), plus Sally Murphy & Simon Bosch’s picture book, The floatingest frog, students in Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 are learning about factual information on frogs in science & technology.

Frogs, frogs, frogs: life cycles, fables

Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students are studying the season of spring – and life cycles. These Youtube video clips (below) will help with the trickier concepts (frog attributes, such as their sticky tongue, etc) not conveyed visually in the big book, “Tadpole diary” by David Drew.


Time-lapse: frog spawn


Tadpoles eating bread


Frog fail! (Dragonfly escapes frog attack)

And, for a bit of fun:

Super Fly carries frog (haha)

We are moving onto Fables this term, and the first fable ties in quite nicely with the work on frogs in Life Cycles:


The frog and the ox


La grenouille et le boeuf – The frog and the ox


The frog and the ox fable

Springtime is silkworm time

Silk Worms
Silk Worms by mayakamina, on “Flickr” Creative Commons.

A teacher colleague asked when to expect silkworms, hoping to keep some in her classroom to study life cycles.

A bit of a wait. Not spring yet! Which reminded me: we have silkworms here annually for K-6 – one teacher collects the eggs and keeps some from year to year. Once, when I was teaching Stage 1, we came back from holidays for Term 4 and I never thought to check the old shoebox on the cupboard from the previous year. We’d had a few hot days in a row and, during a visiting student teachers’ maths lesson, a kid said, “Why are there full stops walking across the ceiling?”

Even the far wall was crawling with tiny black specks. We downed tools, went across he road to our oval and I sent every child running over the expanse of grass to get two mulberry leaves each. We returned to the classroom, stuffed the leaves into the box and the student teacher recommenced her lesson. By lunchtime, almost every little black speck had sniffed the leaves and had traversed the ceiling and back into the box.