Nature “did-you-knows?” ~ FROGS edition

Each term we aim to focus on a particular topic in our study of God’s beautiful creation.  This year we have been following Ambleside Online’s suggestions for each of the three terms.  My goal is to make six entries into our nature journals each term (that would be every other week), but it’s actually worked out to be about three to four entries per term.  Winter was tricky!  Our topic for the second term was “weather/climate” so we didn’t have many sketches for our nature journal, but we did learn lots about weather.  More on that another day.

This term we are studying insects, but we are not bound by that when there are so many wonderful things to observe this time of year!  On the recommendation of a fellow homeschooler, we visited a pond at a local park this week with friends and were amazed to see more frog eggs and tadpoles than we could count!  Boo (my budding naturalist) could have stayed by the pond all afternoon!  We didn’t have our nature journals with us, but we spent some time during our Friday Fun Day sketching from the pictures we had snapped.

  
 Here are a few things we learned about frogs this week.

Did you know…

• frogs live near ponds and toads live on land
• toads lay their eggs in strings of jelly and frogs in jellied masses
• frogs are much better jumpers than toads
• a frog’s slimy, slippery skin and strong hind legs for leaping make for a quick getaway from predators
• a frog’s small nostrils are closed while underwater (Boo says they have “built in nose plugs!”)
• frogs burrow and hibernate deep enough in the mud to escape freezing in the winter