Frog & Toad @ The Virtual Vine

Arnold Lobel

Hop on in to find some fun "froggy" activities!

Harcourt Trophies 2nd Grade uses Frog & Toad as one of their story selections. I'm doing inclusion this year with my 2nd graders, so some of these activities may be specific to that reading series.

Frog & Toad Facts

Frogs

Toads

smooth, moist skin

live mostly in or near water

good swimmers

makes long jumps

avoid direct sunlight, heat

more active at night or on rainy days

have bulging eyes and fairly good vision

have a long, sticky tongue to capture prey

have teeth

group of frogs is called an army

average age is 4 - 15 years

dry, rough, bumpy skin

live mostly on land

shorter, less powerful back legs

walks instead of jumps

avoid direct sunlight, heat

more active at night or on rainy days

have bulging eyes and fairly good vision

have a long, sticky tongue to capture prey

have teeth

group of toads is called a knot

average age is 4 - 15 years

Tip: I always have trouble remembering which is Frog and which is Toad in the story. So I explained it to our 2nd graders like this ... Frogs like water, so that's Frog sitting on the island. So to remember that, think about frog and a foggy or "froggy" island. :) (One of my past students use to say it was "froggy" outside instead of "foggy!" :) )

Bulletin Board: My neighbor's

Trophies Frog & Toad Vocabulary Cards: Print out the cards below to use with small groups and have students match the words to the definitions.

Frog & Toad Vocabulary Matching Cards

Adapted workbook pages:

pg 26

pg 27

Editing:

Frog and Toad editing

Scavenger Hunt: Created by Alice Thomas

Scavenger Hunt

Compound Words: Use Barb's activity to have students match the two frogs that would go together to make a compound word. You could even make a log for each set and have the word printed on the log. To make the compound word, the two correct frogs would need to hop onto the correct log. There's some brown wood grain border that could be used for the log (see Carol's photos below), or you can make your own. Thanks Barb for making this cute activity! :)

Compound Words printable 1

Compound Words printable 2

Frog Float: This idea was shared on one of the 2nd grade mailrings. I haven't tried it, but do have some ideas for adapting it. Give each student a big scoop of lime sherbet in a cup (frog's head). Pour in Sprite to almost cover head leaving only face above "water." Add two mini marshmallows for whites of eyes (I'd like to see if you can snip one of these in half and only use one marshmallow per student). Place a mini chocolate chip, brown M&M, or drop of chocolate on top of each marshmallow for center of eye. Use chocolate syrup from a spout and make a wide smile. Last, add a piece of red Twizzler, licorice, or piped icing for tongue. Drink with a straw.

Riddle: What happens when a frog and toad collide? A: They become tongue tied! :)

Five Green and Speckled Frogs: Carol, at The Learning Tree, shared this activity with me. She's a whiz at coming up with cool new ideas! :) Print the story from the download below and make this interactive book. If you'll notice, as you turn each page, there's one less frog on the log! Also, only the last page actually has the log and the water. The other pages just come right down to the log where it looks like the frogs are on the log. So the book would have 6 short pages (counting the cover) and one long page. Click on the photos below to enlarge them.

Download the text for the book.

cover

pg 1

pg2

last pg

*Stop by Carol's page to check out what she's up to now! It's always something good!*

Another idea: http://www.carsondellosa.com/buddies/pdfs/fivegreenandspeckledfrogs.pdf

Five Green and Speckled Frogs Math Mat: Have students act out the song as you sing it for good subtraction practice. The frogs are stickers on milk caps. Also, shared by Carol.

How Many Frogs? counting book: I created this book to use with my kindergarteners at the beginning of the year. It only covers 1-5 since they start the first week only learning about number 1 in their RE class. I left enough room in the boxes of the last page for them to write the numbers 1-5 if they can.

How Many Frogs? counting book (numbers)

How Many Frogs? counting book (number words)

How Many Frogs? pocketchart: I like to put all my books on sentence strips and read them with my students using a pointer until they're very familiar with the text. Then we start to try and track text in the book (with kindergarteners or those students at that level). This is the book that I made above and how I use it in the pocketchart. The frogs are Ellison cut-outs.

Frog Counters: I have a whole basket of those colored, plastic frogs that you mash on the behind and they jump. I'm going to number a bunch of Ellison lily pads and have the kids count out the correct number of frogs for each lily pad.

Measurement: Use the same frogs from above in an activity for estimating measurement. Have students estimate how far they think their frog will jump then let them make it jump. Have them measure how far it jumped and record the measurements on a chart. Graph the measurements for the class to see who had the longest jump, shortest, same, etc.

Pompom Frog Counters: Cut out green felt or foam hearts using the small Ellison heart cutouts .. the ones that you can cut 4 hearts from a quarter sheet of paper. Glue a green pompom on top of the point of the heart and the humps of the heart stick out and become the frogs feet. The heart will help to stabilize the pompom and keep it from rolling around. Glue two wiggly eyes to the top and a piece of rolled up red felt for a tongue.

Bean Frog Counters: You can also create frog counters by painting dried white beans green (cheap spray paint) and using a white paint pen to add eyes to the humps on the bean. Then add a black center dot in the eye, black dots on the back of the bean for spots and a red tongue and a smile. :)

Tattle Frog: Annette had the idea of getting a stuffed frog to have in the classroom for the children to tell their tattles to. She said it saves her ears. :) Thanks for sharing, Annette.

Ribbet: Get another stuffed frog and name it Ribbet. This frog will hop around the classroom from one student's desk to another ... but only to those who demonstrate appropriate behavior or whatever the specified objective is he's looking for. :)

Froggie Literature Pocket: I'm going to make Literature Pockets for each of my students. Inside the Literature Pocket will be the things that we create for the Frog Unit. It will have their books, any art projects, etc. Below is the label I created for the front of their pocket.

Literature Pocket label (color)

Literature Pocket label (blackline)

Pocketchart Shapes: Use this sentence frame in your pocketchart to teach and reinforce shapes with your students at the beginning of the year.

This is a (circle). Who has a (circle)?

In the first sentence, instead of the word in parentheses, have a picture of the shape. Each student will have a card with a shape on it. The student that has the matching shape will bring their card up and place it at the end of the second sentence.

As the year progresses and they begin to learn their shapes, you can change the sentence frame to ..

This is a circle. Who has a rectangle?

Froggie Number Lines: Sometimes I have students who have good one-to-one correspondence in counting, they just can not get the number identification down pat. Those students are taught to use a number line to help them with their numbers while they're learning them. With that in mind, I created this Froggie Number Line.

Don't know what a 6 looks like?

Hop down the number line and count as you go.

Stop when you say 6.

Now you know the number 6! :)

Froggie Number Line printable

A Frog In Your Pocket: Hmmm ... how to explain this. :) This is an activity for the student to match lowercase and capital letters. You have to purchase the denim pockets (the one in the picture is actually blue because my denim ones are at school), print the yellow letter patches and trim with pinking shears or fringe, then glue a letter patch to each pocket. Print the coordinating letter cards on cardstock and then laminate everything. Slit the denim pockets back open using the point of a sharp pair of scissors or an Exact-o knife by barely running it down the crease making sure not to cut through. You can leave the pockets free floating or attach them to posterboard, a tri-fold board, a bulletin board, whatever you want to do.

letter cards printable

patches printable

Froggie Name Plates: When teaching letters, I do a lot of things with their names ... so I created these matching names plates. Hopefully they'll be big enough to squeeze their names onto and then they can use them for models, maybe cut up one and use for sequencing, etc.

Froggie Name Plate printable

*Note: someone on TA suggested using these for sight word cards instead of name plates! Good idea! =)

I'd Rather Be A Frog book: This is a factual book that I wrote, and my sister illustrated, to go in our Froggie Literature Pocket (see above). I also make pocketchart pictures to go with it, because I always put my books on sentence strips and use them in the pocketchart so that we can read them together there. The books are printed for the students to color and use independently or with their friends, however I will do some modeling with them. I do not expect them (kindergarteners) to be able to track in the books at the beginning of the year. We can use the pocketchart pictures to practice matching the pictures to text as well as cues for the text. *for purchase at The Teacher's Bookbag

I'd Rather Be A Frog

Number Practice: Print, cut in half. Practice writing numbers underneath. Because these squares are about the right size, you could also use the number strips to have the students put number tiles in the correct order, I think. I'll have to try it when I get to school to see if they fit.

Number Practice printable

Welcome Cards: Print and sign these cards for a "hoppin' good start' to a new school year.

Welcome Cards

Froggie Quilt: We made this quilt using ideas from my friend Carol that I adapted. We made the lilies after reading the book Once Upon a Lily Pad. The lily pads are from a reproducible that I had and we reduced them to about 8.5 inches to fit on the 9 inch square. The white part of the lily is made from a coffee filter. I folded it in half and had the children cut sharp points on the rounded side (which made each one unique) :) . Then I used another coffee filter to cut circles from 3 colors of layered pink tissue paper. We folded those circles in half and the children cut sharp points in them as well. Then we bunched the pink paper up in the middle of the white paper and twisted the bottom. Then I glued these onto the lily pad which the children had glued to a white square.

I made the frog head on the computer and printed it on cardstock. The children cut them out and "decorated" them by answering questions from a frog glyph I wrote.

The caption says: We are so hoppy to be learning!

The bottom paper is the frog glyph.

I just LOVE how this quilt turned out!!! :)

Art and Writing: In one of the books we read it talked about all the different things that a frog eats: dragonflies, flies, grasshoppers, etc. So I had this reproducible pattern for this frog and I needed to extend it to be more than just an art project of just cutting it out and gluing it together. Sooo ... I created the tongue for it from red construction paper and had the children draw something on the end with a black crayon that they would want their frog to eat (or what they'd want to eat if they were a frog). Then they rolled up the tongue and glued it to the frog. Then I had them fill in the sentence frame with the word that matched what they drew on their tongue. Since these were kindergarteners, I either helped them spell their words or they copied them from a piece of paper. Then I mounted them on the red construction paper for displaying. The frog pattern came from one of those freebies that they send you in the mail trying to get you to buy a whole set of monthly things that goes on for years.

Frog Life Cycle: These patterns came from The Mailbox extensions online. I'd packed up all my books at the time and didn't know exactly what I was supposed to do with them so I created my own activity. :) We painted paper plates blue to represent the pond and then they glued the pictures around the plate in the correct order of the frog's life cycle. Since the adult frog lives both in and out of the water, we put her on the lily pad.

Books:

The Wide-Mouthed Frog

Five Little Speckled Frogs

The Frog Prince

Frogs ~ Gail Gibbons

From Tadpole to Frog ~ Wendy Pfeffer

Jump, Frog, Jump ~ Robert Kalan

The Icky Sticky Frog ~ Dawn Bentley

Once Upon a Lily Pad

Froggy Goes to School

Where Do Frogs Come From?

Too Many Frogs! ~ Sandy Asher

This is how I displayed my books. The shelf was already blue, so I added two different colors of lily pads and before we'd added the lilies to our quilt, they were in our "pond" as well. I'd hoped to add some frogs, but I don't have any frogs (stuffed, ceramic, etc).