Return of the Tadpoles

Along time ago, about three or more months, I went kayaking with my family at Watson Lake. While we were there, Patrick and I caught six tadpoles. While we were catching tadpoles, I spotted a tadpole that had actually started growing legs. It was even bigger than the frog that we saw earlier. Patrick nearly caught it, but the tadpole escaped too quickly. We put the others in an old water bottle we found in the car so we could take them home. When we arrived at home base, we left them in their water bottle on the porch. We had decided not to move the tadpoles into something bigger until Patrick and I got home from Eagleridge the next day. Now you are to hear the more recent story of the "tadpoles."

The day after we went to Eagleridge, we spent our day studying tadpoles. We learned what they like to eat, how long it takes for them to turn into frogs, and other helpful things about tadpoles. We also tried to figure out what type of frog would come out of our tadpoles, but we couldn't find our type of tadpole. That's when we found out they were not tadpoles at all. Our dad had suggested they were this from the beginning, but we didn't believe him. After a little research we found the truth. These animals live in large groups. We saw some real tadpoles swimming around with them which was why we thought they were all tadpoles, but they weren't. We had caught a group of minnows!

Just this week we went to Flagstaff to see some fall color. We wanted to go to Hart Prairie, but it was closed so we just drove around in the mud pretending we had four-wheel drive. :) We had decided to bring the minnows with us so we could drop them off in one of Flagstaff's lakes. We wanted to put them in something similar to their environment. When we were done driving through the aspens, we started driving to Lake Mary. We turned of onto this dirt road thinking it led to Lake Mary. We drove on this street that wasn't even on the map for an hour to only get about two miles. During our nice drive, we thought we had passed Lake Mary and were on our way to Mormon Lake. Then we thought we had passed Mormon Lake when we got out of the dirt. We saw this horse while we were going one way off the forked road, but he kept telling us to go the other direction. In the end he was right.

We ended up at Lake Mary where we deposited our minnows. We weren't even sure if they were alive, but we didn't fret over it. We arrived home late on a school (Eagleridge) night. That was okay though because we learned a lot from this trip. This is one of the ways a homeschooler learns. By experiencing! I also learned never to catch my pets again.