CD Giveaway - Sam Shrieve, "Bittersweet Lullabies"
Ends Nov 29, 2009
The current student at Berklee College of Music has a rock 'n' roll pedigree, but delivers a pleasing and diverse collection of soft pop on his debut record. Enter our contest for your chance to win! |
|
|
Book Review: If Dogs Were Dinosaurs
by R.J. Carter
Published: August 30, 2005
| Author: |
Genre: |
Publisher: |
Price: |
David M. Schwartz
James Warhola |
Children |
Scholastic Press |
$16.99 US
$21.99 CAN |
 |
|
If your dog were as big as a dinosaur...
...his dinner would fill up your living room.
David Schwartz's If Dogs Were Dinosaurs is more than a simple journey into the realm of "What If." It's a cleverly disguised math lesson that teaches readers the concepts of proportions -- through multiplication and division -- by presenting such fantastical concepts of imagination as a moon the size of a marble, germs as big as gerbils, and making mountains out of molehills. First comes the setup, then the analogous results, presented such that the reader actually has time to mull over the idea before being presented with the mind-blowing follow-up (an Earth the size of a baseball, a handkerchief that covers a city, and a mole that makes Godzilla feel inferior.)
In the final pages, Schwartz deviates from the single-sentence concepts (brought to staggering life by illustrator James Warhola) into more detailed structure, explaining the exact math behind the fantastic ideas. Presenting this initially would run the risk of turning off math-wary readers. But by saving it until the last, a curious kid might actually be more inclined to learn just why the Earth would be a baseball if the moon were a marble -- even if it means having to learn the diameter of the moon, the diameter of the Earth, and how to apply the difference in proportions to the diameter of a marble to get the final result.
If Dogs Were Dinosaurs is Schwartz's followup to If You Hopped Like a Frog, which was another exploration of geometric and arithmetic progressions.
Grade: A+
|
