Frog Life Cycle: Cut and Paste

A round pond fills most of this 1st grade page, with five white lily pads around its edge joined by orange arrows. The top pad already shows a clump of frogspawn in the water, and the other four pads each hold an empty dashed square. At the bottom is a strip of four round pictures to cut out, in mixed order: a plain tadpole, a tadpole with back legs, a small froglet on a lily pad and a grown frog on a lily pad. The child cuts out the four squares and glues each one on its pad, going round the pond from the frogspawn to the frog.

The frog's cycle is the one children find most surprising, because the young animal lives in water, breathes differently and looks nothing like its parent. Frogspawn, tadpole, tadpole with legs, froglet and frog is the order a first grader can learn, and the arrows run back from the frog to the frogspawn so the cycle closes. The froglet and the frog both sit on a lily pad, but the froglet is smaller and still has a short tail, so ask children to look for the tail before they glue.

One sheet, five stages, four to glue. Scissors and glue make this a longer lesson than the base page, and it rewards a short talk first about what a tadpole eats and where it lives. It pairs with the plant cut and paste page in the plants family, which uses the same loop of boxes. In NGSS terms it supports 3-LS1-1 early. The compare face at grade 3 puts this cycle side by side with the butterfly.