Recycled Art for a Frog Themed Unit Study

Bare as a frog pond in early spring, the classroom fills in with plants, water, mud, insects. The frog habitat grows as the children create art projects and learn about the life cycle of our favorite amphibians.

Hour by hour and day by day the room fills with a frog pond theme environment that the children and I create together.

As we read about frogs and observe frogs down at the frog pond we notice more and more details and add them to all areas of the classroom until it is filled with frog themed art, science, music, social studies, games, projects and more.

Photo Credit: Frog Pond
on Grandma's Graphics, Public Domain

 One day I decided to turn my classroom into a frog pond. The walls were already blue.

There were bulletin boards on three of the four walls with a chalkboard on the fourth wall.

During the first week of school the children had been experimenting with mixing yellow and blue to make green paint.

It was easy to teach them how to cut the paper into long strips for Cattails and round lily pads for frogs to sit on.

Cutting helps children develop find motor skills needed for writing stories. We do a lot of that too. The lily pads hide poems and stories that the children write about frogs after careful observation.

When a child finishes an assignment he or she is allowed to go up to the lily pad board, carefully lift the edges of the lily pads and read the poems and stories written by fellow students. On the chalk rail below the ponds I keep stamp pads with insect stamps. Whenever a child finishes reading a story or poem he or she is allowed to feed the frogs by stamping an insect on the board. 

It doesn't take long before the pond is alive with insects flying around ready to be turned into a frog meal.

We made the bulletin boards look like frog ponds and vernal pools.

Photo Credit: Frogs and Cattails
From Pixabay

The stories by Thornton Burgess, such as Grandfather Frog, are written with a simple sentence structure and vocabulary.

Most children are able to read these books on their own by the end of first grade. Don't let that stop you from reading it to them, however.

Children love to have stories read to them over and over. They will be delighted when they are finally able to read these frog stories themselves.

We use Jim Arnosky's illustrations as inspiration for writing in our nature journals. We look carefully at the illustrations each day before heading down to the frog pond and then again when we return in order to improve our artistic techniques.

It takes time and patience to paint a frog with watercolors. Sometimes you must use very washed out colors such as the tall grasses behind this frog.

Sometimes you will be using dark green and waiting for it to dry in order to add the black spots or the white highlights.

Photo Credit: Frog
Available on Allposters