Inventors

 

To start our unit on inventors, I divided students into groups of four and gave them a photograph to examine.  Their job was to record things they noticed about the picture.  After a few minutes we came back together as a class and compared our findings.  We came to the conclusion that roads in the past were very confusing.  People drove in different directions, which in return was very dangerous for all drivers because stoplights were missing from the picture.  Yay!  This is the same problem an inventor, Garrett Morgan discovered! 
As students continued researching inventors (Pebble Go was their favorite online resource) they learned about Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Benjamin Franklin, just to name a few. Students also worked together on a tree map identifying characteristics of the inventors and then created their own Popplet. 
Following all their research, students then had the opportunity to create an invention of their own!  They identified a problem and wrote how their invention would solve it.  Then using a variety of misc. supplies (empty cartons, boxes tubes etc.) student got right to work.  THEY LOVED IT!  I think we have some future inventors in our class!