Frog Classroom Theme

It would be hard to guess how many hundreds of classrooms have dressed up the venerable Carson-Dellosa Weather Bear.

Step over now, Bear, ’cause the Weather Frog is in town!

Seriously, you can use the Carson Dellosa Weather Frog Bulletin Board Set to study seasons, graph the weather, liven up your morning calendar time, and clarify for the kids what clothes are best for what weather.

Just put the frog on the board in your calendar corner and dress him right for each day’s weather. Carson Dellosa has also done a matching calendar set — and yes, it goes with the Birthday Frog Bulletin Board, growth chart, behavior mod bulletin board set, notepads, stickers…

There are some other ready-made frog decoratives we like:

• Frogtastic classroom basics
• Frogtastic classroom helpers bulletin board set
• Frogtastic days of the week chart and months of the year
• Frogs and lily pads bulletin board set
• Big frog job assignment bulletin board set
• Frog Number Bulletin Board Set
• Hoppy Birthday Frog Bulletin Board set

Myra from Carson Dellosa showed us how to add wiggle eyes to ready-made classroom frogs, and we have been grateful ever since. For centers, class big books, and so many other uses, the wiggle eyes are just the perfect touch.

Bethany’s blog shows how one teacher used the Carson-Dellosa frogs to set up a super-cute classroom.

You can make your own frogalicious centers, too.

For this one, we put two frog cutouts with openings onto a base. We labeled them “Fact” and “Opinion,” but this center idea will work for anything that involves sorting.

We used smaller cutouts to write facts and opinions. We put them in a pocket, so students could sort them into fact and opinion by tucking them into the openings of the cutouts.

Use frog cutouts for your own special flash cards, word or number cards to fancy up your pocket chart, or Myra’s “Poke’n'Peek” centers.

Here’s how you make a Poke’n'Peek:

• Write one or more math problems on the frog’s belly.
• Punch a hole right by the problem.
• Poke a pencil through the hole and turn the frog over.
• Write the answer directly next to the pencil that peeks through.

Now the students can read the math problems, say the answers aloud, and then use a pencil to poke and peek and check their answers.

You can do the same thing with other kinds of questions. This is great for matching questions, vocabulary for foreign language (put the English on the back, or a picture if you want to stick with the target language only), and states and capitals or similar memorization practice.

I’ve tracked down some other froggy center-making ideas for you:

• Shapes, Etc. has a PDF file with a bunch of frog-themed center ideas using their frog cut-outs
• Check out the Enchanted Learning frog page. It has a mix of centers, worksheets, crafts, and other stuff.

And in case you want to study frogs a little bit as well as frogify your classroom, here are a couple of links for that:

• Frog life cycle sequencing cards to print out.
• The Exploratorium has a page of fine froggy links.
• Check out our Frog Prince lesson plans.

Set out some frog books from your classroom library. Here are some of our favorites:

• Days with Frog and Toad
• Tuesday
• The Wide-Mouthed Frog (A Pop-Up Book)
• Froggy Learns to Swim
• A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog
• The Frog Scientist
• The Green Frogs: A Korean Folktale

Now you can Fully Rely on God in your Sunday School classroom, Read-it Read-it in your reading corner, Hop to It on your helpers chart, and Leap into Learning on your classroom door.