The Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Fractions Book

By: Jerry Pallotta and Rob Bolster

Non Fiction

Grade: 3

 

            Math never tasted so good. Have you ever been able to have fun, learn and eat your math lesson? Well now you can with the use of the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Book. Now the saying take a bite out of learning might actually be true. This book makes math engaging fun and completely relatable.  

            This book explores the use of a Hershey’s Chocolate Bar to explain fractions and how they relate to a whole. It starts with a whole chocolate bar not broken up explaining to the readers that this is 1 whole or 1/1. They begin to explain that once the bar is broken into 12 pieces and none of them have been removed it represents twelve twelfths. Along the way they continually remove pieces to represent new fractions. They continue this until they have no bar left. They stop and explain what six twelfths are equal to one half. They have workers to break apart the candy bar along the way making the book some to life and making things more interesting. Not only do you learn a fun and interesting way to learn fractions the authors place some other interesting information into the book. This makes the book more fun to read and you’re able to take more out of the book then just fraction knowledge. Some of this interesting side information is some of the main ingredients in the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar. The authors also explain the location of the Hershey’s factory and why they needed to be located next to milk farms.

            The pictures in the book are great and look extremely similar to the real chocolate bar. They represent the fractions extremely well and portray the information in a fun and interesting way. They workers in the story add to the book and make for some comic relief when they track paint across the pages. They will also been seen writing on the expressions made by the fractions. Having this book be so relatable makes it easier for students to visualize what is happening and how the fractions work. I know that all students have broken a chocolate bar in half or into pieces when they eat them.

            I would use this book in my classroom when beginning a unit on fractions. I would love to do a lesson with this book and have the students use their own chocolate bar and follow along and with the pages. I would have them model hands on the different fractions and the taking away of the pieces. This will make the lesson and book more concrete and I feel have a hands on visual it will make the information more accessible to more students. This is a great book and I had the book as a child and loved to read it. I feel this is a great introduction to fractions and students will have a lot of fun reading and working along with the book.

 

3.NF  1. Understand a fraction 1/b as the quantity formed by 1 part when a whole is partitioned into b equal parts; understand a fraction a/b as the quantity formed by a parts of size 1/b.

 

3.NF 3. Explain equivalence of fractions in special cases, and compare fractions by reasoning about their size.

 

b. Recognize and generate simple equivalent fractions, e.g., 1/2 = 2/4, 4/6 = 2/3. Explain why the fractions are equivalent, e.g., by using a visual fraction model.