frog in the bathroom

A few weeks ago two of my girls discovered a tiny frog hopping into the girls’ bathroom. They came into class all excited, so I called the custodian to tell her about it, and to ask her to let the kids have a look if she was able to catch it. 15 minutes later she came down to my room with the critter in a little plastic ramekin with holes punched into the lid. Predictably, the kids went nuts- crowding around, telling high pitched stories about other frogs they’d seen. After a while I brought the frog next door to my friend Hannah’s class, so her kids could have a look. We let the frog go at recess, and it hopped away, happy as can be.
As I said, that was weeks ago. But the memory of the frog lives on among my students. I used the story a few times to model the writing process because the kids were a part of it, and thus invested. First I wrote a very boring version of the story, then over the course of a few days made it more and more interesting by adding details that the kids remembered. It was a great opportunity to teach about editing and rereading, about descriptive language, about writing for an audience. Anyway, yesterday the custodian came down to give me some garbage bags so I could bag up all the pillows and stuffed animals in my room. I needed to quarantine them as the result of a lice breakout. (Gross, I know. Now let’s move on.) So when she was in the classroom I showed her the story about the frog, in which she figured as a main character (the rescuer). She sent me an email later telling me how touched she was to be a character in our story, and asking if she could keep it when we were done using it. Let it be known that this story was written with magic markers on giant chart paper. So we fancied it up a bit, the kids forced me to improve my illustration, and I was about to send it down to her when a girl came up to show me the story she’d written about the frog. It was great, and pretty different than the one we’d written as a class. So I asked for a show of hands- who else had written about the frog? Seven hands shot up. Next thing you know I had a parade of first graders headed to the boiler room to give their stories to the custodian, along with the one I wrote on chart paper. I hope she liked them.
I feel obliged to end this post by saying something like, “that little frog touched more than the tile floor when he hopped into the girls’ bathroom that day. His webbed feet also touched our hearts.”
But I won’t. I still want this blog to be a little bit edgy, so instead I’ll end with this. “Frogs are assholes.”