Inventors: Leonardo da Vinci, Carl Linnaeus

Notes from Famous Inventors: Week One!

This falls under the category of a Second Grade study of Virtuous People. My list of all of the inventors I've found is on my website; here is what we did:

Day One

• read Neo Leo: The Ageless Ideas of Leonardo da Vinci by Gene Barretta



• practice mirror writing
• set up an Inventor's Notebook for brainstorming in day and night!

Day Two

• recall Leonardo da Vinci
• do "Milk Invisible Ink" activity from page 42 of Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions: You Can Build Yourself
• do "Make Your Own Paint" activity from page 31 of Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions: You Can Build Yourself

• add Leonardo da Vinci to MLB

Day Three

• do "Close-Up Classification" activity from page 79 of Puddle Questions for Science - Grade 4

  

• read Karl, Get Out of the Garden! Carolus Linnaeus and the Naming of Everything by Anita Sanchez

Day Four

• recall Carl Linneaus
• consider animals that might be difficult to classify
• read A Platypus, Probably by Sneed B. Collard III



• look up scientific name of platypus (Kings Play Chess On Fine Grains of Sand)
  

• add Carl Linneaus to MLB

Notes on da Vinci:

I like Neo Leo for its introduction of the Inventor's Notebook, but it's pretty clunky as a read aloud. Many of the other books about Leonardo da Vinci are NOT designed to be read aloud either, although they're wonderful resources! I just purchased Laurence Anholt's book Leonardo and the Flying Boy which I'm hopeful will work better as a read aloud narrative for a future lesson.

Leonardo and the Flying Boy
by Laurence Anholt

The awesome resource books for going deeper into Leonardo da Vinci are

Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions: You Can Build Yourself
by Maxine Anderson

Leonardo da Vinci for Kids: His Life and Ideas, 21 Activities
by Janis Herbert

Leonardo: Beautiful Dreamer
by Robert Byrd

Of these, Beautiful Dreamer is the most beautiful and best for readers who like their text chunked up on a page and interspersed with illustrations, Leonardo da Vinci for Kids is the most biographical, and Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions has the most variety of doable hands-on projects and would tie in very nicely with a Physics block.

Notes on Linneaus:

An excellent vintage early reader book about scientific classification is Benny's Animals and How He Put Them in Order by Mellicent Selsam.

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