The Wide Mouthed Frog

Spring is here!!! We are learning about a variety of life cycles in our Pre-K class and reading lots of great books about animals that come out in the Spring. One of the favorite units is our unit on Pond Life, which includes all the animals found around a pond, especially frogs!
This week, we are reading two versions of the same story about the Wide Mouthed Frog. Although the stories vary a little, essentially the story is about a frog that goes around telling smaller creatures that he has a big wide mouth and will eat them. Eventually, he comes across something bigger than himself and discovers he is the desired meal time snack! 

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The Big Wide Mouthed Frog by Ana Martin Larranaga is a favorite in our class! The kids love to help tell the story by chiming in with the repetitive portions of the text!

Wide Mouthed Frog by Keith Faulkner is one of my favorites, because it is set in the Okefenokee Swamp, which is located in Georgia and Florida, so it includes creatures my students are familiar with. The kids love it because it is a pop-up book, and what kid doesn't just love a pop-up book?

We made our own wide mouthed frogs, using construction paper and paper plates. 

If you have a favorite Wide Mouthed Frog story that you love, please share it in the comments!!

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Creating a Rainforest in the Classroom

I am thinking of doing a rainforest theme next year. Two classes in my school have studied it recently and they had a lot of fun with it.

I love that this teacher borrowed a faux ficus tree from the lobby, and added a few stuffed tropical birds. How easy, and so fun!

Looks like the kids are really enjoying this!

The teachers in this toddler class covered some shelves to make animal dens/caves and painted a waterfall.

The teachers added pictures of animals found in various locations.

I love this giant bird house for rainforest dwelling birds!

My  Can of Worms Measuring Activity would go nicely with this theme, just pretend the worms are snakes!

There are lots of ways to incorporate the rainforest into your sensory table area. Here's what we did when we  learned about frogs and life cycles. Be sure to check out the frog puppet, too!

These are some of my favorite links for great rainforest activities:

*Pre-Kinders has some great activities for the Rainforest Theme.
*Stepbystepcc.com has a good assortment of activities on their Rainforest theme pages.
*Perpetual Preschool also has a ton of ideas for the Rainforest theme.

No theme would be complete without a few good reads. There are some wonderful books about the rainforest. Here a just a few of my favorites:

        

Frog Fun!

We've been really enjoying our unit on pond life. There is so much to cover: frogs, ducks, bugs, life cycles...whew! We have a variety of frog materials and several frog math games in our classroom, so incorporating frogs into the curriculum is pretty easy. We talked a lot about frog life cycles, but I just couldn't seem to find a cute life cycle craft for frogs. (I plan on working on this as one of my little summer projects.) Here's a great Frog Life Cycle Mat from Communication 4 All.

We made these cute frog puppets by simply folding green construction paper.

I put some cute shallow serving trays in the bottom of my sensory table and filled them each halfway with water.  We added some fun foam cut in lily pad shapes and some small frog manipulatives. The children squirted the frogs with water bottles and moved the frogs all around the pond.

Some of our favorite frog books: