One thing I dreaded when I began homeschooling was the thought of school projects. I know my kids would love to do arts and crafts, and science experiments, but everything in my being was fighting against it.
The mess. The hassle. The time. The energy. The clean up. The MESS!
But I love my kids and I want them to have fun in school, so when I saw this tadpole habitat at Walmart, I thought it would be a good compromise.
I mean how messy hard could this be??? Buy a tadpole, go get tadpole books from the library, watch it grown legs, let it go and mark off 4 hours worth of science.
Viola!
So after being asked a million, trillion times “when are we getting a tadpole?”, I stopped in at our local petstore. For a mere $2.95 we had the control sample for our experiement.
On the way home the kids decided to name the tadpole Daisy Dawson. Don’t ask me why. I stopped asking questions a long time ago.
We put Daisy in her new habitat and went to the library a few days later. Much to my dismay, most of the tadpole books were either checked out or at a different library. Over the next several weeks, our books were coming in. We’d read all about how tadpoles are born without lungs or legs and how they swam with their tail until they grew the things they needed to survive on land.
All the books said this process took about 6-8 weeks.
Well, I’m here to tell ya, we were at least a month into the project and Daisy didn’t have so much as a nub where her legs should be. I was a little concerned, but not having ever raised a tadpole before, hopeful that maybe these kinds of things happened overnight.
Then one day we picked up a book all about Bullfrogs. I read it, got all the way to the end and said, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME???”
I remember the guy telling me he had “bullfrog tadpoles” when I bought it. The book said that Bullfrog tadpoles take 2 YEARS to grow into mature frogs!!! Oh great, a 2 year science experiment. That’s exactly what I need for a 4 and 6 year old!!!
Just another reason why I should never try these things at home!
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