paper bag puppets

Youngest came home from a few days with the grandparents with a new puppet. It's a very cute tiger striped kind of thing with googly eyes. He and Middle named it Pickle, I have no idea why. So when school time rolled around, I mentioned I could help him make a paper frog puppet since we are studying frogs and tadpoles right now. He was hesitant - he's never really done crafts like my older two and never showed much of an interest in scissors or glue. I promised I would help him and he agreed. The lure of a new puppet won him over!

Well, now I've created a monster. I helped him with the first one, a frog, but he had so much fun, he's taken off doing other animals. The rest he's done almost entirely on his own:

The blue one is a fish, if you can't tell. Middle and Oldest assure me it doesn't look like a fish, but the boy wanted to do a fish and we didn't have an example so this was the best I could do. I admit it looks a little like a blue Chicken Little.

He wanted to do more today but my allergies were kicking my butt and we had planned a slow morning anyway so I just couldn't do it. I felt bad putting him off until tomorrow so we will surely do more then.

Frogs!

Wow, these guys morphed fast. We saw legs last week, on Thursday I think. I didn't write it down, but I'm pretty sure my pictures are dated, I will have to go through and see. We saw arms for the first time Sunday. We had a froglet out of the water on Tuesday and today we saw this, less than a week from the first leg sighting:

Some of the tadpoles haven't even gotten legs yet. There may be more than one kind, but we now have about 10 froglets. Oddly, most are from the last bin I moved outside.

And I shall call him Tiny

Our first froglet! The tads are outside now, in (new, clean) kitty litter pans of all things, but they're small and cheap and I could easily sink them in the ground so they don't bake during the heat of the day. We found this guy sitting on the side of one this morning but of course he wouldn't come back for a picture so I had to lift him up for a millisecond before his little froggy legs remembered to work and he jump back in the pan.

Tadpoles!!!!

I put out a request to my friends to grab tadpoles for me if they saw any. Since we had hard freezes here for days on end, I have not seen ANY frogs around my house. We did find frozen dead frogs around the house this winter so I'm going to guess they didn't survive for the most part. I thought it would be great to have it as a science experiment for my youngest and repopulate the area as well.

We haven't had any tadpoles in two years at least. I think I am more excited about it that the kids. They weren't eating their lettuce so we gave them some of our turtle food and they ate that but it dirtied their tank quickly. I looked online and figured out I needed to freeze or boil the lettuce to soften it. Freezing didn't seem to do enough but they love the boiled lettuce. Yes, I am boiling lettuce 3 or more times a day (in my microwave, takes 2 minutes) for these little buggers. It's worth it because they are fascinating! They demolish the lettuce in minutes, leaving only the veins like a skeleton.

Skeletal remains of lettuce

The little cutie patooties.

So now we are eagerly awaiting legs and at that point, we will probably move them outside and give them a way to climb in and out when they grow arms and are ready.