Frogs and Tadpoles for the Book Fair

It was Book Fair week at my school.  And that means door decorating!!  I kind-of like it because I get to be competitive and creative and I don't even have to feel guilty (although I rarely do...feel guilty that is).  Others at my school complain a bit, but I secretly like it.

This year we have been singing Debbie Clement's polywog song and learning about the life cycle of frogs.  By a happy coincidence one of my kinder kids brought in Frog and Toad are Friends.  She wanted to know if we could read it...of course!!  It just happened to go with EVERYTHING we were doing last week (from our anti-bully lesson on how friends are different, to attributes in math (buttons), to characters and describing words in reading).  So we read a little chapter a day and then we did these super cute frogs and toads from Once Upon a First Grade Adventure  (I confess to finding this on Pinterest, but found out she has a great product at her TpT store too).

After our lesson about character traits and adjectives, we wrote about frog and toad.  Then I let them paint (just toad).  The next day, morning work was writing on a circle about Toad (I reminded them what we wrote and talked about yesterday), then they could paint frog after their writing about toad was finished (uhmmm I was in a bit of a time crunch and I neeeded them dry by afternoon). 

After lunch we made Toad, and wrote about Frog.  Recess....Snack...and just enough time to make Frog! I thought I would do this a little bit each day but things got backed up and Friday was our do it all day.  Sometimes you just have to do that!

Here is our finished door!

Our door went with our bulletin board (which I also wanted to have done because Monday is our Parent's night/ice-cream social/art show).  We once again used Debbie Clement's Polywog song and pictures (you can get them on TpT here).  My kiddos love the song and the pictures so much I wanted to make something kind-of like them.  So we used bubble wrap to paint a piece of white paper.

Paint the bubble wrap, put paper on top and rub (I forgot to get a picture of that part).

Then we colored a pond scene with crayons and painted it with a wash of blue (actually just watered down poster paint...I didn't want to use up the blue in my watercolors and I have access to loads of poster paint).

Then we cut out some frogs and polywogs and glued them on our pond pictures. 

Voila!  Nonfiction pictures for our bulletin board.

 

I think it turned out sooo cute!  Now to pick the book we get for winning second place.  But first my Kinders have to write me their opinion and convince me which book I should choose (I won't tell them I already have both choices covered).  Can we say CCSS  W.K.1?