Inventors and Inventions Unit

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Coming back from a new baby, I wanted to teach a unit that didn't need a ton of preparation. This one was perfect. We read a bunch of books about cool and funny inventions, talked about the technologies involved, played with some of the inventions we read about (like Slinkies and Super Soakers), and then I let the children do a lot of designing and iterating on their own inventions throughout the unit.

This is a really good resource for hands-on activities that help teach kids good design principles. I think they must be from a TV Show? It's called "Design Squad."

If you click on the link at the top left of that page, where it says "Videos," there are some fun videos showing the design process as well. Our favorites were the ones, like this one, where a dad engineers toys out of cardboard for his toddler son.

My brother is a patent attorney, and I would have loved to have him come as a Guest Speaker for our unit, but he lives in California. So we did the next best thing—a Skype call while he talked us through a PowerPoint presentation he'd made and sent ahead of time. It was so interesting! He's so good at explaining things and making complicated concepts seem simple. My older boys, especially, were fascinated and kept asking questions. He taught us about intellectual property and all its sub-categories—patents, copyrights, trademarks, and so forth.

Pictured above, we are on the call with him—a pretty typical picture of our homeschool with half the children in pajamas, me nursing a baby, people climbing all over each other, etc.

These are some "musical instruments" the children invented/built one day: