Frog Pond Small World – Easy Imaginative play

When the rain has stopped and the evening is quiet, we can hear a frog chorus as we lay in bed.

It sounds like every puddle is filled with frogs singing to each other. We try to count how many different songs we can hear, but we give up after three as they all just blend together in one big frog orchestra!

Although we can hear the frogs day and night when the weather is we, we don’t often see them, so we create our own frog pond small world to explore.

Frog Pond Small World

Frogs and tadpoles are such interesting little creations, and often fascinate young children. Their ‘magical’ transformation from a tadpole to a frog and they way they can make so much noise and yet still stay hiddens has captured my kids imaginations over the years so this simple frog pond imaginative play set up is always a hit.

Our frog pond small world is easy to set up and provides lots of opportunities for open ended imaginative and sensory play.

We set up our frog pond on a small table covered with a towel to catch any drips of water and use a plastic mixing bowl as our pond. You only need a small amount of water – just a few centimetres is enough for lots of fun, but not enough to make a huge mess. You could also use a plastic tub, a recycled ice cream container, an underbed storage box, or any low sided container that holds water.

Even a very simple setup of a small bowl of water with some leaves and plastic frogs is lots of fun to play with, but there are lots of easy to find items you can add to your frog pond small world to make it more elaborate!

Here are some of the things we’ve used to set up our frog pond:

• stones or small pebbles
• sticks
• tree cookies (slices of tree branches)
• leaves, twigs, grass from the garden
• a little food colouring to add to the water
• some water beads to add to the water as ‘frogs eggs’
• large flat round leaves (we used nasturtium leaves) as lily pads, or cut some circles out of foam sheets

This is the kind of activity that we leave out for a few days so the kids can come and go as they please, add things, change things around and have lots of time to play and enjoy it.

And just because your child is not so little any more, it doesn’t mean they won’t enjoy some imaginary play. When I set this up for my smallest child recently, all his older siblings LOVED it too!

Books about Frogs

If your kids enjoy the prog pond small world play, they might like some of these books about frogs!

The links below are Amazon affiliate links – if you buy a book I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. If you are in Australia I recommend Booktopia

Tiddalick: The Frog Who Caused a Flood by Robert Roennfeldt

Pobblebonks by Garry Fleming

The Wide-Mouthed Frog by Keith Faulkner (Author) and Jonathan Lambert (Illustrator)

999 Tadpoles by Ken Kimura and, Yasunari Murakami.

Growing Frogs by Vivian French (Author) and Alison Bartlett (Illustrator).

Tadpole to Frog (LifeCycles) by Camilla de la Bedoyere.

Fun Facts About Frogs! by Carmen Bredeson.

A Frog Thing by Eric Drachman (Author) and James Muscarello (Illustrator)

More Frog Ideas and Activities

If your kids are totally frog crazy try one of these fun, easy, frog activities:

Make some of our free printable frog puppets and sing some frog songs.

Learn about the life cycle of a frog with this great animated video.

If you are lucky enough to have access to some tadpoles set up a tadpole to frog observation tank.

Do some froggy yoga with this fun video.

Make some jumping origami frogs!