Inventors: Benjamin Franklin, Louis Braille, Ada Lovelace, George Crum

Notes from Famous Inventors: Week Two!

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:

Week One Inventors were Leonardo da Vinci, Carl Linnaeus

Day Five

• look at the beautiful wooden Tree of Life Puzzle and recall scientific classification (and find the platypus leaf on this tree)
• discuss the scientific method and the importance of changing only one variable at at time
• set up a science experiment (we used the experiment "Will Plants Grow If You Water Them with Juice or Another Liquid?" on page 54 of The Curious Kid's Science Book by Asia Citro)



• read Mesmerized: How Ben Franklin Solved a Mystery that Baffled All of France by Mara Rockliff

Day Six

• recall Benjamin Franklin
• add Benjamin Franklin to MLB
• read Six Dots: A Story of Young Louis Braille by Jen Bryant



• make different combinations of six dots using Golden Bead Material

Day Seven

• recall Louis Braille
• look at examples of Braille books



• add Louis Braille to MLB
• read Ada's Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World's First Computer Programmer by Fiona Robinson

Day Eight

• recall Ada Lovelace
• make designs on slips of paper with a single hole punch



• add Ada Lovelace to MLB
• read Mr. Crum's Potato Predicament by Anne Renaud



• eat potato chips!

notes on Lovelace:

There are three beautiful picture books on Ada Lovelace, and to plan for this block I bought them all and read them carefully to choose my favorite. They cover identical content.

Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark came out first (2015). I read it to my class then. But it failed to really help them understand the idea of the punched cards used in the Jacquard loom. In 2016 both Ada Lovelace, Poet of Science by Diane Stanley and Ada's Ideas by Fiona Robinson came out. For the Wallmark and Stanley books, an illustrator who was not the author was chosen. I think it led to some problems. Again, the illustrations are KEY here because otherwise children do not really have a frame of reference for the invention. I think that Ada's Ideas really shines in this regard. It is absolutely fantastic, both illustration- and explanation-wise. I'm so glad Fiona Robinson created it!!!

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