It started out because I asked Papa Frog if he had any leftover sandpaper. I have done a craft several time with the Froglets involving starfish. You cut out star shapes from the sandpaper, put them down on the table, cover them with a blank piece of white paper and do a crayon rubbing to make starfish appear on the page. Papa Frog came out of his Workshop with this instead.
This is all I have, he said to me. Will it work? I stared at the disk of paper, trying to figure out what I could do with it and all its holes. Then it hit me! Starfish were out, but that disk looked just like a sand dollar when it was covered with a piece of paper and rubbed with a sand dollar colored crayon.
And come to find out, sand dollar are really cool little creatures. Here are a few fun facts that I learned when I was getting this project ready for the froglets.
1. The sand dollar’s mouth has a jaw with five teethlike sections to grind up tiny plants and animals. Sometimes a sand dollar “chews” its food for fifteen minutes before swallowing. It can take two days for the food to digest.
2. Scientists can age a sand dollar by counting the growth rings on the plates of the exoskeleton. Sand dollars usually live six to 10 years.
3. California sheepheads, starry flounders and large pink sea stars prey on sand dollars. When threatened by pink sea stars, sand dollars bury themselves under the sand. Observers have seen a pink sea star leave a wide path of buried sand dollars as it moves across a sand dollar bed.
When I was just a Froglet myself, my Grandpapa lived on a small island off the southern coast of Texas, called Port Aransas. I was lucky enough to spend several summers with him, surrounded by the sound of the crashing waves, and the warm beaches and the balmy island air. Those are some of my best memories. I roamed the island like a wild thing, with a roll of dollar bills in my pocket. I read so many books over those summers, and wrote so many stories. But one of my favorite memories was digging for live sand dollars. If you walked into the water, up to your knees, squatted down and dug your hands into the sand, you would find them by the handful, fuzzy, small brown sand dollars. Until this point, I had only ever seen the bleached sand dollars the shell shops sold. I caught hundreds of them each summer. A few big ones we did keep and bleach, but most went back into the water. The fun was in their finding- a veritable treasure hunt. 
She created several elements, including the inside of the oyster before 
and after 
and found actual photographs of the inside of the oyster and pearls. 
Ray Bear did a poster display with an amazing amount of information on starfish, including several things I didn’t know- Did you know that a starfish can completely regenerate its body from one leg and a small piece of its middle? I didn’t. 
How could I resist? You know I couldn’t. So when the laces came in, I decided I had to make some lacing cards to go with our ocean unit. While these provide wonderful fine motor skill practice for the Little Froglets, I find that it is also a favorite activity with the Big Froglets too. The process for making these is super simple. It takes large simple images (these were from a digital coloring book I scored at Scholastic’s Dollar Sale this year), packing tape or a laminator, a hole punch and some pretty coloring. 
I printed my image on cardstock (brown craft cardstock happened to be HALF the cost of white, so we are rolling with brown for now). Then I used scented markers (a cheap Amazon school supply find and a throwback to this Mama Frog’s own life as a froglet) to color the images. A quick trip through the laminator, a trim with the scissors 
and a bout of hole-punching 
and the images were all ready to be laced. While this is technically a school activity for the Littles this week, everyone took their turn lacing cards, from Papa Frog down to The Boy.
5 Speckled Frogs 