Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day

I can’t really figure out why, but the second Tuesday in October is celebrated annually as Ada Lovelace Day, a day to recognize the accomplishments of women in STEM and encourage women and girls to explore STEM careers. (It’s definitely a worthy day I just don’t know why it is this particular day. She was born Dec. 10, 1815 and died Nov. 27, 1852, so the day had no clear connection to her.)

It’s a great day to celebrate the legacy of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron (though he was not involved in her life and her education was directed by her mother) who was a pioneer in early computing. She worked with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computer that was never built. She recognized that the computer could be used as more than just a calculator, and she wrote the first algorithm for a computer to follow, making her the world’s first computer programmer.

Science Sparks has a good printable fact file on her that you can use to get started learning about her and her accomplishments. Kids Konnect has fact sheets and printables you can use in the classroom or at home to talk about her life and work.

Get a free set of printable punch card numbers to use for number recognition with an early-computing twist from Playground Parkbench.

Teach Starter has a basic coding activity using pattern recognition that little kids can do. Any activity involving coding without a computer would be a great thing to do to celebrate this day. Or use scratch to build a poetry generator, with this project from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Check out a BrainPop video on Ada Lovelace below.

If you need more resources, there are tons of printables related to Ada Lovelace on Teachers Pay Teachers, including reading passages, coding projects and other STEM activities and more.

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Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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