Pop-Up Paper Zoo

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.