“But nothing happened. Not a sound.” – a Very Quiet Cricket activity
This month the Virtual Book Club for Kids is featuring one of our favorite books by one of our favorite authors … The Very Quiet Cricket, by Eric Carle.
Two of our very close friends recently moved to a house on the Rouge River. For those that aren’t familiar with the Rouge, it is a major watershed area in southeastern Michigan.
- The Rouge River has four main branches- the Main, Upper, Middle and Lower
- These branches total 126 miles of river.
- The watershed drains 467 square miles of land.
- Forty-seven units of government are located within the watershed.
- The watershed communities are home to nearly 2.7 million people. (cited from Friends of the Rouge: Media Info)
With living right on the Rouge, our friends became members of the organization Friends of the Rouge. Part of what the Friends of the Rouge do is study the wildlife along the river to help determine the health of the river. Listening to frogs and toads calling is a big part of research (noisy frogs = happy, reproducing frogs). Interested members can sign up to study the different calls, listen for them, and report the findings.
This sounded like the perfect activity to go along with the book, The Very Quiet Cricket.
We’ve read this book many times, but we reviewed it on the day we did the activity. We also listened and “studied” the many different types of frogs and toads that we may hear on the river. The Friends of the Rouge website has WONDERFUL recordings of the frogs and toads that you can download for free, as well as see photos of the frogs and toads.
Then, that night at dusk, when the frogs and toads are supposed to be the noisiest … we went to listen!
We listened and listened … “But nothing happened. Not a sound.” We listened some more … and we DID hear lots of crickets! But no frogs. We read the book one more time as we sat outside, on the deck near the Rouge River, with the sound of crickets all around.
It was late and time to go, we said our good byes and headed to our car. That’s when I saw …
A TOAD-ally cool ending to our evening!
Don’t FROG-et to check out all the other great ideas to go along with “The Very Quiet Cricket” from the Virtual Book Club for Kids!
Laura Hutchison
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What a great activity and so sorry you didn’t hear them but works very well with the book. I love listening to our frogs but they are much much earlier in the year back in March time where we live.
We have some very active frogs behind our house usually each summer, especially this week after the tropical storm passed by. It’s such a unique sound that all children are drawn too. So glad you spotted one as you were leaving. I bet the sounds of all the crickets was quite magical after reading the book. Thanks for linking up to the Virtual Book Club!
Thanks for your comments, Cerys & Kim!
I did know that it was kinda in between spring and summer frogs in our area … so I knew that it might not be the best time to listen. But we’ll keep at it.
Funny thing is that at our old house we heard TONS of frog and toads all summer in the evenings (tons of wetlands all around the neighborhood). It was very wonderful chorus to hear … and something I definitely miss!
It’s very nice to be able to experience it in nature. The sounds they make is better than the sounds of busy cars on the road. 🙂
I love the village feeling here. Thanks for sharing.