Frog Hopping Measurement Activity

When I first mentioned to Strawberry that I wanted to do an activity for each letter of the alphabet, she immediately wanted to do frogs for the letter F. What could be more fun than making her small plastic frogs hop? I added in her garage sale find (a small measuring tape) and added a learning element to her frog hopping activity.

About the Book Inspiration

Before we did our activity, I suggested we read If I Jumped Like Frog by David Schawartz. In the book, we learned that, if we could hop like a frog could, we could jump from home plate to first base! That’s a long way!

Each page in the book is about a different animal’s strengths: the strength of an ant (lifting so much of its body weight), the brain of a dinosaur, the swallowing skills of a snake, and so forth. I love how the last one ends the book (hugging like a bear). It is truly an informational book about the amazing animal world (as well as a fact or two about our human body). It also has the bonus of sharing some fascinating facts that could be nice challenges for the reader.

Lessons Learned from Frog Hopping

Although we don’t have any living frogs with which to test the author’s information about how far frogs can jump, we luckily did have plastic frogs.

We have an over abundance of plastic frogs. I bought some inexpensively for Strawberry’s Valentines this year. So, what could be better than making a dozen small plastic frogs hop?!

Strawberry recently found a measuring tape at a garage sale; the seller threw it in for us since Strawberry had fallen in love and I’d already bought books. Anyway, she was so excited to have a use for her measuring tape.

In this simple activity, we practiced measuring as well as predicting and comparing. We’d guess how far the frogs would go, and then we’d try to flip it. When it landed, we’d move it to the measuring tape to see how many inches forward from the starting line it had gone. One of our frogs went 80 inches! Most of them landed within 20 inches.

Strawberry loved the challenge. A bonus to this small challenge is that it also tests fine motor skills. It actually takes more control to flip a plastic frog than you’d imagine.