Frog Molds

I'm not sure if my school has ever had an art program, but we definitely had one today! I'm currently working on a "frog" unit. In this unit, students are taking a closer look at just frogs. Traditionally, I have had a unit on ecology, a unit on cell biology, a unit on plants, etc... However, I got this crazy idea to just zone in one animal and let the students see all examples of ecology concepts through frogs in my frog "ecology" unit. Some would say I'm narrowing down the curriculum. I'd say that we're going deep not broad. Anyway, I digress. This week we began learning about the stages of a frog's life cycle, and we finished up our frog molds today! Each mold represents a stage in a frog's life.

 
After they let the clay molds dry out and harden overnight, they painted them!

I'm so proud of them, and how they turned out! While students were waiting on different stages (clay to harden, paint to dry, etc.) they also wrote a story to accompany their frog. In the story, they had to explain each stage in a creative way. They had to include imagination, creativity, and accurate and complete descriptions of each phase. If you would like to see the whole lesson, it's here in my TPT store.) Here's the beginning of one of my student's papers:

Jimmy, Have you ever seen your baby book? You were such a cute little one. We didn’t have a camera when you were growing up. So, we decided to write a story about what you looked like instead.

Creative, right!? I was so very impressed by their work and writing. This is definitely one of my top ten projects of the year.