A Little Green Visitor

I am going to preface this post by telling you it will be a long tale.
Today was one of those days that I LOOOVVE as a teacher.  I had my day planned out, knew what we were going to do, when we were going to do it...all in place.....until a student from another class showed me a little green hitch hiker her brother had found in a box of bananas at the shop he works at.
My eyes popped open, I smelled the fresh breeze of my home State Queensland, the sugar cane, the mangoes, the tropical rain (oh wait it was raining).  I heard the cluck of geckos hunting moths at night and lastly the laughing croak of the little green tree frog sitting in a small container, looking back at me as he hurriedly tried to burrow under the leaves.  Just like me he was away from his home, probably wishing for the warm sunshine, clearly not liking the cold weather, a visitor in a strange land...and I was NOT going to let this opportunity pass me by!

To understand this I have to go back about a week, when a conversation about swimming turned to frogs. (I'm sure you all know how that happens.)  One little girl said to me she had never seen a frog in real life!  "What!" I said, how could this be?  I guess I take frogs for granted, having spent much of my life in the tropics of Australia where frogs are quite prolific. Currently I live in inland rural Australia and now that I think of it I haven't seen a frog here either.  Don't get me wrong I'm sure they are there, just not so obvious as the fabulously  fluorescent green tree frog.

As you can imagine my planned, predictable day went out the window!  I stole  borrowed the little hitch hiker and showed my little girl her first real life frog!  She was very happy as was the rest of the class, we even learnt the Auslan sign for frog (we already knew green and tree).  There was much discussion about what kind of frog it was, where it came from etc etc. From this we did a KWL chart, we made a list of adjectives to describe our frog, we found an information book and a story book about green tree frogs (Thank you Steve Parrish!) we made mind maps to show what we had learnt about green tree frogs.  In the afternoon we did an internet search to find answers to some of our questions about green tree frogs.

So I wanted to share a few pics of our mind maps that we did on the run today as well as some pics of my little green friend!

He's looking at me!  See his white belly, I'm not sure if he is a white lipped tree frog or a regular green tree frog

This is when he got camera shy.

Please don't ask why they put celery and a snowpea in there.  They eat insects.

Here are some of the Mind Maps the students did after we read some books

I like that some of them drew pictures to show the tadpoles or the adult frog

I forgot to take photos of the KWL chart and Froggy adjectives.  Well I guess we will be investigating frogs for the next couple of weeks so do not despair more pics will follow!  Don't you love being spontaneous!  I am off to dig up all my froggy activities out of my dumping ground  office and will be sharing froggy blogs for the next couple of weeks at least!