Wednesday, July 15, 2020

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:


Day Five


Day Six


Day Seven


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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