Last week (on June 15th) when my five-year-old and I returned from his mini-camp, my husband and two-year-old surprised us with tadpoles! They collected them at a stream where they found hundreds of tadpoles. Most of them will get eaten by predators, so we’re going to help three of them along until they mature and then release them in the same spot we found them. (At least we hope we get that far.) So far they are doing well!
We’re keeping them in a container box on the porch. We used tap water, but we put a water conditioner in it that we use for our fish aquarium. Later we also added some of the water and algae from the stream that the tadpoles came from. We put some rocks and a filter in the water, and we are feeding them bits of frozen spinach and tapole/frog food we found at the pet store. They have gotten considerably fatter since we got them, and they seem happy!
We keep a screen over the box when we’re not watching them to keep mosquitoes and other pests out of the box.
I’ll keep you updated on the progress.
And let’s have a round of applause for my husband who initiated and did the work for this awesome homeschool science project!
Mama of Letters 
My tadpoles like to hide under the rocks in my pond. Do yours hide under the rocks?
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No. Actually, they tend to stay near the edges of the box. We can see them quite well. In the streams around here they also tend to stay out in the open, which is why we can see so many of them. I hope we’ll be able to identify them once they get bigger.
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Yay for the daddy’s who invest in their children, indeed! Good luck with the tadpoles. It will be fun to watch them grow and change.
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Thank you, Janelle! Yes, I’m glad we have a daddy that knows how to do these things!
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Yay for your husband! I really want to make this our next project. We have been focused on caterpillars/butterflies for a few months. But I know my kids would love to raise tadpoles. I look forward to your next posts about how they progress.
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Thank you, Julie! I am planning to raise butterflies too. Kind of wanted my two-year-old to get a little older before we do that, but we’re having so much fun, maybe we’ll do this every year!
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