Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Grow-a-Frog therapy?

One night back in August I was about to drift off to sleep when I suddenly remembered my grow-a-frog pet I had as a child. It would be the perfect pet for one of my small groups. The children in the group need something to bond us together, as well as something to care for since caring for others and showing compassion is something we are working on every day.
Growing up all of the kids in my small community had Grow-A-Frogs we bought from our favorite (only) toy store. We watched our frogs grow in their different stages of life and compared notes on play dates. My family's frog, Fred, use to sing to us at the dinner table. He'd wait for everyone to start talking and then he'd add his own sounds to the mix. He went on to live for a very, very long time.
In high school I started working at the toy store and became responsible for the care and feeding of the town's original frog, Sarge, who had been living in the toy store since I was about 8. I am not sure whether or not Sarge is still alive, but I know at one point he was going on 15 years.

Not thinking that an extended life-span might not be a great thing to stick myself with, I got up in the middle of the night and googled 'grow a frog'. I ordered immediately and didn't sleep the rest of the night since I was too busy planning all the possibilities.

This was way back in the beginning of August. The first frog arrived over October intersession but was dead (A huge thank-you to the great intersession teacher who cared for my dead tadpole). To make up for the dead frog the company sent us two new frogs along with a very kind email saying, "We're so sorry for your loss". The frogs arrived yesterday and I might actually be more excited than the kids. (Although they are pretty excited). One is still a tadpole but the other is considered a 'froglet' so we actually get to see the growth patterns now.

In my excitement I might have gone overboard with my frog plans... Along with all of my goals for our social group, the first grade teacher in me sees the writing activities. I'd love for the kids to keep a frog blog about the frogs' growth, development, and what they observe from the frogs. Our tech person at school is helping me with this and right now we're all set up, I just have to get the kids focused enough to want to blog instead of staring at the frogs. (I'm embarrassed to admit it but I even spent a good 10 minutes watching them this afternoon when I should have been getting work done).

I'm so excited about starting all this but am starting to wonder when I'm actually going to have time to put this all into place. I tend to have big ideas. Now I just need to put the small pieces into place... Wish me luck on this experiment and keep your fingers crossed that this batch of frogs is healthy!

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