Frog Life Cycle Tuff Spot

At the request of Mr D, following on from the success of our butterfly life cycle tuff spot last week this weekend I made up a frog life cycle tuff spot for the children.. This was a really simply one to do and I used the following items to make it:

Frog Spawn – I used clear aqua beads for this. These do take a bit of time so it’s worthwhile making in advance. I put the in water the day before I wanted to use them and just left them until I needed them. I also filled a tub with green, blue and purple ones – again leaving these the day before. A word of note – they do break up quite easily so it would be wise to not leave these to be played with unsupervised, especially with younger children.

Tadpoles – I used (uninflated) water balloons for these. A different texture to play with as well as having a general tadpole like shape to them. Plus different colours lends itself to colour sorting activities.

Froglets – These were a little harder so I chose to use some sticky jelly frogs for this. They were smaller than the frogs that I had bought and had the benefit of being in between the texture of the frog spawn aqua beads and the fully grown frog.

Frogs – These were plastic frogs I picked up in Tesco from the ‘party bag’ section. They’re different colours so again lends itself to colour sorting activities, as well as talking about species type etc. I used some foam circles to cut into lily pad shapes for the frogs to hop on and off. You could also add in some large branches / small logs as well as stones etc.

I added the large plastic tub of coloured aqua beads on as well and the children loved these. They were really engaged with them, putting their hands in and then adding the frogs and froglets in too. I picked up some small plastic scoops which they had great fun with using them to scoop the beads out. They were a bargain at 70p for three from Home Bargains too, so worth looking out for if you’re in there. I popped out some plastic dishes and tubs and Miss E had fun scooping out the frogs and froglets into these

In the large tub I added letter tiles to spell out ‘frog’ and had left a magnetic sign out with frog and tadpole spelt out. I’m trying to do some early sound discrimination with Mr D and get him to recognise similar sounds, eg: dog, frog, log etc as well as letter identification. I asked him if he could scoop the tiles out and then place them in the right order to spell out frog. Both him and Miss E enjoyed doing this for a short time, and I’ll expand on this again this week in our follow up lapbook work.

As it was a lovely day yesterday we left the tuff spot set up and they came back to it periodically throughout the day, as well as coming back to the large tub of aqua beads again today inside the house. We have read through a frog life cycle book a couple of times and they can both tell me the four stages of the life cycle, so I hope when we create out lapbook later in the wee they enjoy doing that as much as they did with our butterfly one last week.

I have a few more books to share with them about frogs, as well as some general activities planned around pen control, counting and sticking etc which I will share again later in the week. I’m sure the full frog life cycle tuff spot will be made up again later in the week for them to continue exploring.