- Hello, amazing learners.

Welcome back to "Read, Write, Roar".

My name is Ms. Rodgers and today, we will be learning about the physical characteristics of frogs and tadpoles.

Physical characteristics mean the features of their body or what their body looks like.

We will read a poem and look for the letter patterns that make the long A vowel sound and we will also learn about homophones, two words that sound the same but they're spelled differently.

Are you ready to learn?

Let's get started.

- [Narrator] This program is made possible in part by Michigan Department of Education, the state of Michigan and "The Kresge Foundation".

Additional support for educational programming provided by... And by viewers like you.

(upbeat music) (lion roaring) (light upbeat music) - Hello amazing learners.

Welcome back to "Read, Write, Roar".

My name is Ms. Rodgers and I have a special poem for you today called "The Tale of Frog and Taddy".

The author of this poem did something a little bit tricky, so the author gave us the title that has a homophone.

The homophone is the word tale.

Tale means to tell a story, but also, tail with an AI means like something that's on the back of an animal, like a dog wagging its tail.

So in this poem, we're going to take a closer look at "The Tale of Frog and Taddy" by Shannon Fuller and pay attention to the homophones and also to the long A sounds that we will encounter in the poem.

Are you ready?

Let's read.

"The Tale of Frog and Taddy" by Shannon Fuller.

Frog was playing in the rain, on a cloudy day with Snail.

They saw a frog swimming in the lake, but this frog had a long tail.

It was their friend Taddy, a tadpole you see, who was pretending that he was a whale.

Frog and Snail swam away, and the friends spent the day, being chased at the lake, by the whale.

Taddy the whale is a tadpole, we know, a little frog who will soon lose his tail.

So, just like the poem said, remember, a tadpole in the beginning has a tail, but when it becomes a frog, it loses its tail.

Did you notice that our poem had some long A sounds?

Well let's take a closer look, and remember, we did our chart, our anchor chart with our long A sounds.

Now, there are three different patterns that we have for the long A sound.

We have AI, A consonant E and AY, so let's start with our first column, AI, and it says A.

Good job.

We have rain.

Err-ain.

That AI right there.

We also have tail and it has the AI sound as well.

Then we have snail.

What does the AI sound give you?

A. Aye!

You are correct.

So now let's go to our A consonant E. A consonant E, we have lake.

Ull-ake, lake.

The E is telling the A to, that's right, to say its name.

So the E is telling the A to say its name, so this word is lake.

Then we have snake and then game.

Our final column is our AY.

AY says, yes, A.

So here we go.

We have duh-ay, day, playing and also away.

So all three of these patterns make the long A sound.

So now let's go back to our poem.

I did something special for you.

I also took the poem and I underlined all of the long A sounds that have the pattern AI, A consonant E and also AY.

So let's look at it and I want us to read it together and then we're gonna focus on remembering those sounds.

Here we go.

"A Tale of Frog and Taddy" by Shannon Fuller.

Frog was playing in the rain, on a cloudy day with Snail.

They saw a frog swimming in the lake, but this frog had a long tail.

It was their friend Taddy, the tadpole you see, who was pretending that he was a whale.

Frog and Snail swam away, and the friends spent the day, being chased at the lake, by the whale.

Taddy the whale is a tadpole, we know, a little frog who will soon lose his tail.

Great job reading with me.

So, just as a reminder in our review, we learned that the long A sound can be spelled in different ways.

We also learned that a tadpole will lose its tail when it becomes a frog.

And finally, we learned that tale and tail are homophones, which means they sound the same, but they're spelled differently and they have different meanings.

What other words do you know that sound the same?

Well, I'll see you next time.

Maybe you can look around your house and figure out some homophones that you may see there or even outside and play a game with it.

See you later.

(light upbeat music) In the title of our poem today "The Tale of Frog and Taddy", we learned that tale and tail are homophones, which means they sound the same, but they're spelled differently and they mean something totally different from each other.

I have some sentences here on my pocket chart for tale and tail.

So this tale, again, means to tell a story and this one right here means something that's on the back of an animal, like a dog wagging its tail.

So, a story.

The tale of Frog and Taddy or the story of Frog and Taddy.

Tail, something on the end of an animal, a tadpole has a tail or a tadpole has something on the end of it that wags like a dog.

So now, let's see what will happen when we change the meanings of those words.

The tail of Frog and Taddy.

This tail is like the wagging of a dog's tail.

The wagging of Frog and Taddy.

That doesn't really make sense.

Now let's read this one.

Tail.

The tadpole has a tale.

This is one is a story.

A tadpole has a story.

Now, we see that both of those changed the meanings of our sentences, so we're going to try with some other words.

I have plane, P-L-A-N-E, plane, and I also have plain, P-L-A-I-N.

So this plain means something like ice cream, for instance, if you don't have sprinkles on it or if it doesn't have a lot of flavor to it, it's just plain.

It's simple.

And then this one, plane, P-L-A-N-E, is something that's flying up in the sky, you know, like the plane you hear sometimes that's flying overhead.

So we have plane as in airplane and plain as in simple.

I have some more words.

Whale, W-H-A-L-E, whale as in this a big fish that you see in the ocean or in a body of water.

And then we have wail, W-A-I-L. Now this means something like, wait for it (wailing).

It means to cry.

Now that may have been funny to you, but really when someone is wailing, it means that they're crying or making a loud sound because they're sad.

So we have whale, W-H-A-L-E, a fish, or wail, W-A-I-L, which means to cry and make a loud sound.

So now, I need your help.

We're going to put a sentence together, but we have to unscramble the words and some of these words actually have a long A sound and a homophone, so let's get started with that.

(light upbeat music) Now, we're going to sort some words and put them in a sentence.

Here's our first word.

Sail.

And that sail is like on a boat on the water.

Will.

Ship.

Across.

The.

Ocean.

And finally, we have another word, the.

Now, I need to put these words in a sentence and we know that the beginning of our sentence should start with an uppercase letter, yes.

So which of these have an uppercase letter?

This one right here, so we're gonna put the up here and what should go at the end of our sentence?

Punctuation.

So I'm gonna put this word here, ocean, at the end.

And I'm gonna move all these other things over.

So now let's read what we have so far.

The will ship across sail the ocean.

Does that make sense?

No, it doesn't.

So, what is the subject of the sentence?

What is the sentence talking about?

Something that's going across the ocean.

Ship!

The ship.

Let's change that, move that over.

Now let's read it now.

The ship will across sail the ocean.

Well the first part sounds pretty good.

The ship will... What action will the ship do?

You got it, sail, the ship will sail, so let's move sail up here and put across down here.

Now let's read what we have so far and I'm going to get my painting pointer.

(woman giggling) The ship will sail across the ocean.

That sounds good, so let me put all of these words together so we can really have a sentence.

So we have the ship will sail across the ocean.

I have my uppercase letter, I have my subject, which is the ship, and my predicate, the action, sail across, the ocean and I have my period at the end.

Now, let's do another sentence.

This sentence has the word sale as well.

This sail, S-A-I-L, is different from this sale, which is S-A-L-E.

This word sale means that something is less expensive or the price has changed to something that's lower.

So I'm gonna put sale up here.

A.

Big.

Is.

The.

There's something special about this word, the.

What do you think it is?

You noticed it!

Yes!

It has an uppercase T and we know that sentences begin with an uppercase letter, so we might as well just go ahead, save some time and put this right here in front.

I'm gonna move this one down.

The next word is having.

And then my final word is store.

So let's read these words.

The a big is sale having store.

Does that make sense?

(woman laughing) It doesn't, at all.

Well, we already used our clues.

We know that a sentence begins with an uppercase letter, but it ends with punctuation.

Which word has punctuation?

Sale, so let's go ahead and move it to the end of our sentence.

So we have the a big is having store sale.

What is our subject?

What's going on in this sentence?

Store!

Yes, so we should change this and put store up here.

So I'm gonna move that down.

The store big is a having sale.

So we have our subject, which is the store, we need our predicate, the action, what's happening.

I think I heard someone said having a sale.

(woman laughing) So let's change that.

The store is having...

The store is having a sale.

Big.

Well, we know that this isn't correct because this is after the period.

And what type of sale is it?

Yes, it's a big sale.

So let's go ahead and read that.

The store is having a big sale.

Now, that sounds right.

We have our uppercase beginning letter, we have our subject, the store, our predicate, which is the action, having a big sale and we also have something special at the end and that's called our punctuation right here at the end.

So in this sentence, we have a really good way of seeing how this word sale is a long A sound that's spelled with A consonant E, this one, AI, both of these sound the same, but they are different because they mean something different and they also are spelled differently.

So we built our sentences by putting the words in order that make sense.

We started with having an uppercase letter at the beginning of our sentence and we know that it has to have punctuation at the end, we also know that we have to have a subject and also a predicate, what the sentences were about and the action that was happening.

We also noticed that there was something special about both of these sentences.

This sentence has sail, this sentence has sale.

Both of these are spelled differently, they sound the same, but they mean something totally different.

So I thank you for helping me to put these sentences in order and also to work on homophones.

I'll see you next time.

(light upbeat music) - Hello there, learners.

Welcome back.

I'm so happy to see you again.

We are gonna continue working on the project that we started the other day where we were thinking about one topic of one animal, which mine was frogs, and learning about it and then writing about it, doing research and then writing in informational text about this animal.

Let's review what we did the other day when we were talking.

We know we're discussing and learning about how animals survive and grow and how animal adults and their babies, their offspring, are different.

So the other day, with the topic of frogs, we found out frogs are amphibians, remember that?

How they can live on land and water.

We talked about their habitat, or where they live, and I wrote my ideas down here and then, we wrote our sentence over here.

Here's what we wrote about the habitat.

Frogs live near water.

Frogs can live by ponds, streams and lakes.

They are amphibians, so they can live in water and on land.

I bet some of you read that with me.

That was great reading.

So I drew a little picture of my habitat and there's a little frog on a lily pad.

So I continued to do some reading and as I was doing reading from some of my different books, I was finding out a lot about the body of a frog and I started jotting down some words on my organizer.

I learned that frogs go through a huge change, I learned something about their eardrums that's really important, that they have to have these really large eardrums.

That helps them to communicate and survive.

They have really big eyes as well and in particular, I was thinking about when I read about the red-eyed tree frog.

When they go hunting at night, they need their really big eyes to be able to see.

We also learned about that word tadpoles and we're gonna learn more about why the word tadpole is important to frogs, why they have a tail as a tadpole, legs, we know that, something special about their mouth and then about gills and lumps.

I learned these things from reading these three books.

They all had some information about that.

It's really important for us to know that frogs go through this really big change, that something very special to frogs that makes them their own animal and has something really unique and different for them.

We know about their habitat and so today, we're going to switch and start thinking about describing their body.

Okay now, learners, we are gonna do some writing and before we do, there's a couple of things I wanted to remind you about that you've been learning about in our episodes and that is how we build sentences.

I wrote some sentences here that I wanted to share with you.

I'm gonna teach you a little trick that a teacher taught me when I was teaching first grade.

And she said there's an easy way that you can remember this.

So we learned a little symbol and I'm gonna draw it for you.

We said we always need to make sure we start with an uppercase letter, put spaces between words and put punctuation at the end of a sentence.

So sometimes in first grade, kids would put this at the top of their paper so that it would help them remember to say did I put an uppercase letter, do I have spaces between words and did I put the right kind of punctuation.

So you'll see an example, this is a statement, I like to observe nature, period.

Do you, too?

I don't know, so it's a question mark.

Let's talk about it!

I'm excited so I put an exclamation point.

I'm going to do some writing with you today and as you're thinking about writing, I just made a miniature version of my symbol and I'm going to just hang it right here so at the end of my writing, I can check and say did I put an uppercase letter and some spaces and then punctuation at the end.

So the big idea that we don't wanna forget is that frogs go through a huge change in their life cycle, which we learned is called a metamorphosis.

I'd like to write that sentence.

Frogs change a lot in their life cycle.

How's that?

Frogs change a lot in their life cycle.

I'm gonna write it.

Frogs.

You might know how to spell that by now.

Frr.

Did you see my uppercase letter?

Do that at home too.

Frogs.

Ch, that's my CH, change.

You might notice that A, ch-ange.

The silent E at the end we've been learning about.

A lot.

During.

Their.

Life.

Cycle.

Now that is a statement I'm making and I need to put punctuation.

It's not a wondering.

Frogs change a lot during their life cycle?

So I don't wanna put a question mark.

It's not really like exciting in a way that I would read it.

Frogs change a lot during their life cycle!

That'd be a little bit too much.

I'm just saying a statement.

Frogs change a lot during their life cycle.

I'm gonna put a period.

That's our first sentence.

We're gonna be able to write more later, but one of the things I wanted to teach about today is making labels when you're doing your informational text because labels help us know.

So if I was gonna label this, what do you remember this is?

Yeah, this is the egg.

Remember, this is the tadpole egg and around it, do you remember what I told you that was?

That's like some jelly that's around it.

So I'm going to just draw a little line and then I'm going to write egg, E-G-G. And then here, I'm gonna write the word jelly.

That's how frogs, the egg of the tadpole, survives 'cause it's eating off of this jelly that's around it when it's in that big clump in the water.

What's this one called?

Do you remember what this part is?

This is a tadpole, right?

(woman clears throat) Excuse me.

And what's this part on the tadpole?

The tail.

Do you remember what that part is?

The gills.

We wanna make sure that we remember that tadpoles have gills to breathe.

And later, frogs have lungs, but in the beginning, tadpoles have gills.

They have a hard mouth.

And a tail.

I bet you can spell tail.

There's two tails.

One, a tale, a story, and one, a tail like this and you've been learning about A sounds, right?

This tail is T-A-I-L. You probably knew that.

T-A-I-L.

So that's our tail, we've got the gills, we've got the hard mouth and we know that this is called a tadpole, right?

So I'm just gonna maybe put that on my drawing.

Arrow.

I'm gonna write the word tadpole in all uppercase letters so I know that's a little different.

That's something else you can do in your book.

You can decide when you wanna use uppercase letters and lowercase letters and bold print to make things stand out.

We're probably not gonna have time to do all the labels today, but I'm gonna show you one more labeling and then I'll finish this before the next time we're back together.

So, these are the frog's hind legs.

Let's draw an arrow down because it's gonna go from the tadpole to this part, so we know this is the tail, and we know how to write tail, T-A-I-L, and these are the hind legs.

They are behind.

Hind legs.

And then there's more hind legs up here.

We can just do this too.

So when we do a diagram and we put labels on, it helps us remember the parts of an animal.

As you're thinking about doing your research project, be keeping these things in mind.

Thinking about all the things you've learned about the letter A and the way that you can spell A when you're doing your own sounding out of your words and trying to write them down, be thinking of those patterns that you know, making sure you put your punctuation and just keep reading and writing and having fun.

- [Narrator] This program is made possible in part by Michigan Department of Education, the state of Michigan and "The Kresge Foundation".

Additional support for educational programming provided by... And by viewers like you.

(upbeat music)