If You Hopped Like a Frog

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Schwartz, D., & Warhola, J. (1999). If you hopped like a frog. New York: Scholastic Press.

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Summary

The book, If  You Hopped Like a Frog, is full of interesting facts that help students visualize and think about proportional reasoning. It starts with, "If you hopped like a frog . . . you could jump from home plate to first base in one mighty leap!"  The page is illustrated with a frog jumping normally on the front, and a boy playing baseball who is hopping way above the umpire as he jumps from home plate to first base. There are 12 of these wonderfully imaginative scenarios. The illustrations are amazing and help students clearly see what would happen if they too had the same abilities of a variety of creatures.

Located at the back of the book are the math calculations at how the author formulated the proportions. In our frog example, it states that a 3-inch frog hops 60 inches, and calculates that to be 20 times its body length. The book then explains how to mathematically figure out this same proportion for a human, depending on one's height. This is a great book to teach ratios and proportions, using real world facts.

Teaching Idea:  Student-Authored Electronic Informational Books

I will begin this lesson by reading If You Hopped Like a Frog aloud to my students, showing them the pictures on our overhead as I go along. We will then mathematically work through the first proportional reasoning found in the back of the book. Following that, I will have my students break into pairs and work through one of the other proportional reasonings so that all 12 of the examples are analyzed. The student pairs will have the opportunity to share the reasoning behind their examples.

Once my students have been exposed to the ratios and corresponding proportions in this book, we will create a class book relating to proportions readily found in our own lives. Each student will be responsible for developing two pages in our student-authored electronic informational book. They will need to come up with a real world idea to which they personally relate, research and develop a ratio from that idea which can be compared to humans, calculate and explain the proportional reasoning behind it, and then add an illustration to clearly show how this comparison would look. As this lesson is full of creativity and fun, plus facts from their lives, it is bound to stimulate my students' thinking and readily engage them in the learning process. We will publish our class book on our wiki for all to enjoy and share.

This lesson corresponds with Math TEKS 5.1(C), (D), (G); 5.3(I), (J), (L).

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