Teaching the Frog Life Cycle in Preschool: Lesson & Activities
Frog Life Cycle Lesson Plan
Circle Time:
Before beginning this frog life cycle lesson plan cover the following to establish prior knowledge with your students during “Circle Time”:
- What is a frog?
- What is a tadpole?
- Have the students ever seen tadpoles in the pond?
- Have the students ever seen a frog in the pond?
- Allow brief time for students to share their own experiences with frogs and tadpoles.
Read-Aloud Ideas:
Oscar and the Frog: A Book About Growing Up, Geoff Waring
Frog: A Life Story, Michael Chiney
The Frog, Angela Royston
In the Small Small Pond, Denise Fleming
Tale of a Tadpole, Karen Wallace
Music and Movement:
Five Green and Speckled Frogs - author unknown,
I’m a Little Froggy - author unknown
I’m a Little Green Frog - sung to the tune of “Little White Duck”
Language:
Here are some vocabulary words you may wish to spend time introducing to your students:
- Frog eggs
- Tadpole
- Frog
- Life cycle
- pond
Use the new vocabulary words to make pictures about the frog’s life cycle. You can also use the words to make a class story book about the frog’s life cycle. Or, you can ask the children individually to draw a picture depicting their favorite part of the story or frog’s life cycle and then have them dictate a sentence or two describing the picture. This will help your preschoolers with their drawing and labeling.
Math:
Count and sort frog manipulative’s’ by color and size. Hand each child a pile of frogs; first they can sort by color, next they can count each pile, and then count them all together.
Frog manipulative’s can be found at “The Bright Futures” stores, or more cheaply at “Big Lots” or “Dollar stores.”
You can also find them on-line. A good place to search is homeschooling supply stores.
Science:
Bring in fish tank with frog eggs in it.
For this frog life cycle lesson plan and activities for preschool, ask the children to keep a journal with their pictures and/ or comments in it, along with their observations about the growth of the frog-eggs turning into tadpoles and eventually frogs. Continue the journal observations all the way until the frogs are released back into their pond. The children can keep their journals afterward. Make sure the children understand why they are being released they are wild animals and belong in the pond not in a fish tank.
The children can also do a fact sheet labeling pictures of the frogs life cycle. I have seen these labeling fact sheets on Enchanted Learning. There are a lot of puzzles games and fact sheets available about the life cycle of the frog.
Show a video like the Magic School Bus that is about the life cycle of the frog or something similar to the magic school. This will help the kids establish prior knowledge and visual see and learn more about the frogs life cycle.
Arts and crafts:
Create a pond scene as a mural on a wall in the room with pictures the children have colored and cutout about the life cycle of the frog such as the eggs, tadpoles and the frogs.
Library:
Set up reading area with books about frogs and their life cycle. You may also wish to set up posters about frogs and their life cycle.
