Observing the life cycle of frogs was a new project for me.  That is the wonderful thing about an emergent curriculum is that we are following the interests of the children. 

In the spring one of the teachers asked if I was interested in some frog eggs and she brought in a pail full of pond water with a clump of frog eggs in it.  I had placed the pail on a table with magnifying glasses and frog books around so that they had references to look at to show the frog's stage of development.  A couple of days after we received the eggs they started to hatch into tadpoles.  This was very exciting for the children and we started to journal about the observations that we made.  We fed the tadpoles some fish food and we also put in an air circulator to oxygenate the water.  A week later the tadpoles stopped moving and didn't survive.  We talked about what factors may have caused the tadpoles not to survive and why?

A couple of weeks later a student from my class asked if he could bring in some tadpoles that he had been observing in a pond nearby.  His mom had put them in an aquarium with dog weed and rocks and there was constant circulation in the aquarium.  They had both researched information on frogs and learned that tadpoles liked boiled lettuce to eat and that it should be changed each day to prevent the water from becoming slimy.  We had the aquarium placed on an angle so that when the tadpoles lungs started to develop that they had new rocks to climb on to get out of the water. 

         After reading a number of stories about frogs and their life cycle.  We learned that in week 9 the tadpoles start to grow their back legs.  Then in week 12 their front legs start to develop.  As we observed the tadpoles we found that they developed much sooner than we had anticipated.  After having the tadpoles for 3 weeks we watched them grow back legs, front legs and we were amazed as they turned into frogs!  By the end of June we had 8 frogs and 2 tadpoles.  The children were able to see the life cycle of eggs turning into tadpoles, then tadpoles turning into frogs, this was a wonderful process!  It was a new experience for me and one that I would love to do again.