Wordy Wednesday: Ten Tiny Tadpoles

Every Wednesday I will post a great book for you and your child to read together.  There will often be a simple craft or project to go with it to further promote reading comprehension, vocabulary, and communication.

Ten Tiny Tadpoles is a cute story with fun, three dimensional additions to each page:

Click here to purchase.

With every page turn, one of the tadpoles disappears.

Aren’t those the cutest tadpoles you’ve ever seen?  When I was little I used to scour the pond in my neighborhood, knee deep in muck, catching tadpoles in an empty peanut butter jar my Mom would save for me.  Yuck-o. I’d wait and wait and wait for weeks, checking the pond every day, to see if the tadpoles were growing legs yet.

All of a sudden, it was tiny frogs everywhere and we’d wake up to hundreds of jumpy green pests filling up the filters in our pool. Again, yuck-o.

But this book is a very sweet take on counting practice and has the best surprise ending! I won’t spoil it for you.

Why not take a second to teach your kiddos about the life cycle of a frog? I think they are one of nature’s most interesting changelings (right up there with butterflies) and are a great subject for first-then-finally sequence conversations.

I went with four stages: egg-tadpole-tadpole with legs-frog. Prest-o change-o!

First the frog is an egg, then the egg hatches and becomes a tadpole. Next the tadpole grows it’s springy legs, and finally, when the tail disappears, it becomes a frog.

For this project you will need:

White construction paper (or any light color).

Green construction paper.

Markers.

Glue.

Cut the white construction paper in half long ways (hot dog style) so you have two thin(ner) strips of blue paper. Put one aside. We only need one. Accordion fold the white paper into four sections. Each section will be one stage for your frog. If that doesn’t make sense, keep reading, my pictures will make it clear.

Use the green construction paper to cut out one circle (the egg), one tadpole shape, a tadpole with legs, and finally a frog. Add some glue and let your child add each frog stage to the appropriate section. What does a frog start out as? (an egg) Does the tadpole hatch with legs or no legs? (no legs) Where does the frog belong? (in the last section) etc.

Encourage your child to use the marker to add details like faces, pond life, flies or anything else your child wants. Lilly settled on blue water scribbles and a little bit of yellow “sunlife” as she calls it. You can help and add the stage label words. Ask your child what each section is and write down what they tell you. It is always more surprising and fun to access your child’s thoughts than for you to simply tell them “this is the egg, that is the final stage- the frog” etc. etc.

Lilly said the first section was “the tiny baby hoppy”, then “the tadpole”, next “the baby frog”, and finally “Mr. Hoppy” (we have a Mr. Hoppy frog in our garden). She was too impatient to color though and I couldn’t write in her words yet!

I think we’ve flipped through our tiny frog stage booklet a hundred times and I’m sure we’ll flip through it a hundred more when Daddy gets home from work! So easy, but so special to her.

Got a great kids book suggestion for my Wordy Wednesday posts?  A family favorite that your child would like to make a craft about? Leave me a comment! We are always on the hunt for new books to read!