Frogs, frogs, and more frogs!

Currently, my partner teacher is discussing endangered animals and animal adaptations with our kiddos in science. We had a presenter come in and talk about the dangers that are threatening many frogs and making some of the species extinct. Many of the factors point back to humans and things that we do that hurt these cute little creatures. Needless to say, the kids jumped passionately aboard the "save the frogs" wagon and we had a great time researching about them, creating them, and making others aware of their impact.

In science they created created amphibian creatures to scale out of clay.

 In writing, we are working on expository text and so I had them create "Ms. Frizzle" frog reports ... Ms. Frizzle reports are my name for "mini reports." You know the short little blurbs that the students in the Magic School Bus books have on the side of the page - the mini research reports on a very specific part of a large topic?
I show the kids examples of real Magic School Bus reports. Wanda's on pollution. Arnold's on coral reef partnerships. Ralphie's on wind energy. We talk about how even mini reports have a Main Idea, a TS {topic sentence}, supporting details {though they will have less since they are "mini"}, key details that help the support, and a wrap up conclusion sentence.

I had the kids brainstorm something unique and specific that they wondered about frogs ... why their tongues are so long? How they jump? What they eat? Which ones live in Michigan? etc.
we researched them down in the lab .. .. .... .
then we came back and filled in the 4 sections of expository text.
Once they were done with their "Ms. Frizzle Report" paragraph they re-wrote it onto a lily pad.

We also created "Save the Frogs" diamante poems. I had them use Read, Write, Think's diamante poem creator. They LOVED using that! We cut out frog heads and legs and glued them to our poems.

Together with the lilypads, these looked SO cute! The presentor is actually putting on a display concerning Saving Frogs at the public library and asked to display all of our reports and poems. The kiddos were so proud - as they should have been :)

Oh, and of course, we had the kids dress in GREEN :)