How To Make A Frog Pond Spring Sensory Bin

Exploring the frog life cycle is one of our themes for spring. We use a life cycle model at the science table, complete with books about frogs. We sing the 5 Speckled Frogs finger play using our frog props. And then, we introduce our frog pond sensory bin. Oh yes, this sensory table is THE highlight of our frog theme. Lots of frogs in water with pretend lily pads. Our preschoolers love this activity year after year. You will see why as you scroll down. My co-teacher introduced our frog cycle pieces during our morning meeting. She then read a couple of frog books and we sang 5 Speckled Frogs. She placed frog books at our science table and the frog life cycle pieces for the preschoolers to explore after our meeting. The children loved placing as many frogs as they could on the lily pads. I could hear them counting the frogs and noticing which ones matched. (We had at least 2 sets of each frog.) We cut lily pads from green foam sheets, added a variety of plastic plants and small plastic frogs. Oh, and some rocks from our yard. We filled our sensory table with water (we kept it shallow). As they were adding more frogs to the lily pads, they noticed the pads beginning to sink. They compared frogs on each lily pad. Again, they counted and compared. This is a great example of playful learning such as what I’ve shared in my blog post How to Make Math Fun for Preschoolers. They have no idea they are building math skills while playing with this activity! We kept this activity out all week, draining the water at the end of the day and starting fresh the next.