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.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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