All That Crazy Rain

Like much of the east coast, we had a huge amount of rain on Wednesday.  We had just finished our writing workshop, when ED looked out the window and saw that our tiny creek was teeming with water. The kids rushed to get their swim suits on, I got on my big rubber boots and we went down to check things out. The little trickle of our creek was impressive!

It’s not as much as the 2 feet that Florida got, but the kids were pretty impressed with all the rain and flowing water. We spent over an hour outside in the rain. LD rescued a turtle that was being swept downstream. They also found some crayfish and a salamander that were crawling about.

The saddest thing about all this was that our tadpole haven was washed away.  A couple of months ago, we dug out a huge hole next to the creek. It filled with water and the toads did their thing. One day in early April we saw that there were lots of toad’s eggs in our make-shift pond.

A couple weeks later we had dozens and dozens (hundreds?) of tadpoles and more mating toads:

We came to check it out every few days. Then Wednesday’s rain happened. We assumed that all the little tadpoles had been swept downstream.

Today we went to check things out again. You can see from the before and after pictures how much water there was yesterday compared to today (the picture on the right):

Of the hundreds of tadpoles that were in our make-shift pond, only a few are left. But the frogs are croaking and there’s plenty of critters out and about. We saw several frogs hopping about in the creek. The snake below is a Northern Brown Snake.

And the happy news is that this past weekend, we had transported a number of tadpoles into our plastic frog pond.  We had worked hard to weed the garden and partially buried this tub (left by the previous owners). Other years, we had the tub sitting on the bricks.  It became warped (as you can see) and also as the summer wore one, the water became very warm. Hopefully this makes for a nicer environment. Each year we have 3 or 4 frogs that take up regular residence here (when the creek has mostly dried up).

Anyway, today we checked out our pond again and we counted more than 50 tadpoles swimming happily. Plus, two new toads were there as well!

Coincidentally, we finished watching “Floods” in the Raging Planet series today that we’re watching for our Weather Unit. The “flooding” and receding of our tiny creek really helped the kids understand how quickly water can rise.

My sister, bro-in-law and their 3 homeschooling kids know this first hand because they lost their house in a flood in Nashville, TN a few years ago. You can read about that here: My Sister’s Flood Story.

You might be interested in our free printables about backyard animals:

• Free Montessori 3-Part Cards: Amphibians, Frog Life Cycle Notebook (and lapbook) Page

• Free Spring Packet – Eggs, Life Cycle, Animal notebook pages: Whose egg? Life Cycles

————————–

See you again soon here or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page! Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter. You might also want to check out some of our resources pages above (such as our Science, Language Arts, or History Units Resource Pages) which have links to dozens of posts.  Don’t forget to check out Our Store as well. ~Liesl