Friday, May 7, 2010

The Great Unbreakable Frog


When I ran across my real frog specimens kit that I had purchased a year ago, put away and promptly forgot about, I knew that this was the class that it would best serve, especially since the frogs were encased in unbreakable acrylic. At first I passed around for all to see, the 4 rectangular shaped glassy like encased frogs, which are preserved at the various stages of their development. This took more time then I expected as the students were kind of awe struck and in what seemed to be great wonderment as they looked at them. All making sure they had checked out all 4 pieces at least twice. Some were even in disbelief that they were even real, beings that I told them that the frogs were dead, then "why" they asked, "was there no blood?" Thus the way the mind of an 8-year old works. As students were working on another whole group color, cut and paste longer activity about the frog, I chose 4 of them at a time to work with the acrylic frog specimens. They had to label diagrams by filling in the names of the body parts, which could be found written into the acrylic alongside the body part identifying the stages in the frog's life cycle. By having the frogs presented this way allowed for the children to compare and contrast the features of a frog at different stages of its life cycle: egg and tadpole, 2-legged frog, froglet, adult frog, and more importantly, to look in a safe up-close manner. They enjoyed it, and nothing got broken.

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