It seems like light tables are all over kids craft/ homeschooling blogs. Often times I wonder how in the world I could get one of these. The solution is found in this great post from Tinkerlab. The post shows how she economically and simply made her own light table. She was lucky enough to stumble upon an acrylic box frame…but perhaps they are in great supply in all of our towns…if you don’t happen to find a cheap acrylic box frame, she has a link where you can buy one from Amazon. Her photos are wonderful using the light box and salt, and this is definitely a great project that will become part of your child’s daily exploration and learning.
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Learning about Female Inventors and Scientists
Women’s history month is a great time to learn about women’s contributions to the sciences, though it’s great to do this any time of year. Women are historically underrepresented in STEM fields, and learning about female scientists and inventors of the past might just inspire some of today’s girls to learn more in these fields.
Kindergarten Worksheets and Games has a set of printable coloring pages with facts about female inventors and little cartoon people to color along with space for drawing their invention. There are 12 inventors included, such as Maria Beasley Cox, who invented the life raft, and Josephine Cochrane, who invented the automatic dishwasher.
123 Homeschool 4 Me has little printable books about female inventors, many of the same ones as in the coloring pages above, but with more detail than those pages have. Again there are 12 in this collection, which includes Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar.
I love the idea of having older kids do a little research project about a female scientist or inventor. Momgineer has an activity to help kids do just that, though hers isn’t specific to female inventors. This printable has kids make a little booklet with facts about the person they researched (you can make your own if you want since the outline of a person on the page has a beard). There’s also a scientist scavenger hunt in this resource that’s available from Teachers Pay Teachers.
If you’re looking for more female scientists and inventors for kids to learn about, A Mighty Girl is a great resource. Check out their posts about women inventors and female scientists to get you started.
This post from Journal Buddies talks about women in the automotive industry specifically, but it has good prompts you can use for talking about women in STEM more generally, such as who that they learned about inspired them or what challenges you think the women might have faced in male-dominated fields.
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