03/23/14

Bringing Earth Day to the Jersey City Community with Green Dream

The stage is set.

Green Dream posters are in shop windows in Jersey City Heights and downtown Hoboken. This week, they will go up in uptown Hoboken and downtown Jersey City. More postcards are on the way and the newspaper advertising is about to begin.

This is all very exciting! Frogs Are Green, an environmental awareness organization, has mostly been an online presence in the last 5 years, so it’s wonderful to see shop owners embrace the cause and smile when they see the poster. They read what the Green Dream exhibition is about, and say, “Wow, how cool, Earth Day… Save the Frogs Day… Yeah!”

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Green Dream is about bringing awareness to the Jersey City community, who may not know what’s happening to frogs on our planet and that frogs everywhere are disappearing. By showcasing selected artworks created by children around the world this April, local schools and after school arts programs in Hudson County will have the rare opportunity of seeing what children in far off lands think about frogs and the environment.

Some of the countries represented in this first exhibition at The Distillery Gallery and Artspace are: Hong Kong, Serbia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Thailand, The Philippines, Singapore, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Lithuania, Macedonia, South Africa, Kenya, Poland, Canada, Sri Lanka, Latvia, India, Indonesia, Australia, Tanzania, Madagascar, Malaysia, and Bahrain.

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I hope you will share this extraordinary event with others and support our Indiegogo fundraiser…there are just 6 days left!

Link to Campaign: http://igg.me/at/green-dream

— Susan Newman, founder, Frogs Are Green

09/21/09

Teachers: Calling All Frog Artists!

Susan and I are seeking kids’ frog art—lots of it! We hope to encourage kids and their teachers to learn about and get interested in frogs, toads, and other amphibians. If you’re an elementary school teacher, parent, or educator, please send us jpegs (2mb maximum size) of your students’ or kids’ drawings or paintings of frogs and we will display them in school group galleries on the FROGS ARE GREEN blog. We’d be happy to receive images of any art form—sculpture, drawing, painting, or watercolor.

If the art work is part of a school project, please send the jpegs in one bunch. Individual drawings not part of a class project are fine, too. Include the name of your school, state, country (if not the U.S.), grade level, and child’s name for each piece of art.

Please print out the attached flyer to post in your neighborhood schools.

Here are some ways in which learning about and drawing frogs could be incorporated into the school curriculum:

Art classes

Language arts. As we’ve posted before, there so many wonderful children’s books with frog characters. Click on Literary Frogs on the right to see a few. I plan to review more titles in the coming weeks.

Rainforest unit: Rainforest frogs are some of the most colorful and interesting animals in the rainforest.

Endangered animals: Almost one-third of all amphibians are threatened with extinction, yet most kids probably don’t know this. Pick an endangered frog or toad and learn about it.

Local flora and fauna: Learn about the frogs and other amphibians in your area, and also learn to recognize their calls.

Life cycle of animals: Many state science education standards require children to learn about the life cycle of animals. Frogs have one of the most interesting life cycles—from tadpole to froglet to frog.

Below I’ve posted two YouTube videos about how to draw a frog. One is simple line drawing, and the other is more detailed, for older kids.