June 2012
What a fun book to read and sing with students! This book is especially useful when you are already using a version of the original folk song as part of your instruction. I’ve used this book with kinder through 5th grade with great success but I find that I use it most often with 3rd grade. When I read it with students I have them echo the last two words of each stanza on sol-do. Because this book is an adaptation, in most cases I want my students to be familiar with one or two versions of the original folk song before I read this book. With that in mind, this book is a nice contrast to the version of the folk song and game used by Education Through Music as well versions I have heard primarily from my textbook adoption. Additionally there are several old books that contain great versions of the folk song. One of my favorite things to do with 3rd grade after we’ve studied the song for a while is to act it out while we sing it. It’s great!
This book would fit nicely into lessons dealing with the following ideas:
- Songs that emphasis (sol-do)
- Ballads
- Stanza
- Folk song development and change (when compared with older versions of the song and book)
- making predictions – language arts
My list of book lists that I need to create is getting extensive, but I’m hoping that I’ll have a “Froggy” book list available for download before too long…. so keep coming back to MelodySoup to check it out.
